Steve Ramp, Isabel Platten, Alex McCarrel and Troy Tydingco putted past the Sitka breakwater at 3:30 a.m. Sept. 4, en route to fishing grounds far off Cape Edgecumbe, with hopes of catching albacore tuna, a species that isn’t listed on the menu for Sitka fishermen.

Twelve miles off Cape Edgecumbe, the group saw the ocean change from gray to blue, indicating a band of warm, tropical water was moving into the area. They continued offshore, seeking water temperatures around 60 degrees.

About 18 miles off the cape, in about 6,000 feet of water, Ramp saw a spike on the temperature gauge of his 30-foot boat Julia Jean. “So we put the lines in and put out four albacore lures that had never been wet before,” Ramp said.

“Within 10 minutes, we had a tuna on board,” Ramp said.

“It was incredible,” Ramp said. “We kind of looked at each other and went, ‘Oh my gosh. What did we just do?'”

“We just left Sitka on a directed trip to catch tuna on rod and reel, and caught a tuna, an albacore tuna, out of Sitka,” Ramp said.

The catch may be the first-ever on a directed rod-and-reel fishing trip for tuna out of Sitka. In the past, sport and commercial fishermen have occasionally hooked tuna in the Sitka area while targeting other species.

Ramp said he’s been holding on to tuna lures for 12 years, eyeing forecasts for warm waters and calm seas, and waiting for the right opportunity to fish for tuna in the late summer.

“Early last week, I started to see the conditions line up,” he said.

Ramp also heard from RJ Miller, a charter fishing guide who was born and raised in Sitka, and has been eager to catch a tuna, as he's seen signs of the fish near the black cod edge this past month.

Miller said he started making plans to go tuna fishing after hearing on Aug. 29 that a skipjack tuna was swimming in Sitka's Crescent Harbor, where Jason Own eventually harvested the rare fish with a spear gun.

Miller enlisted two friends, Brian Oberreuter and Edward Drake, to join him for a tuna fishing trip on Sept. 4. They departed around 5:30 a.m. on Miller's 30-foot boat Storyteller and communicated with Ramp’s crew while heading off Cape Edgecumbe toward the 1,000 fathom line.

Upon hearing over the radio that Ramp had hooked a tuna, “we were hysterical, we ran straight over there, and we started doing circles on tuna," Miller said.

“We got our first one in the boat, and we just absolutely lost our minds,” he said.

Miller and his crew harvested 21 tuna that day, trolling at up to 10 knots and dragging lures on the surface, up to 100 feet behind his boat.

Miller said that “it was just one of the most insane things that you can imagine when you're fishing, it was fish on at all times and the lines are just screaming, clicking. It was just an incredible experience.”

Ramp’s group harvested 24 tuna. While reeling in the hard-fighting fish, the scene on Ramp’s deck was “bedlam, all of us doing the dance on the back of the boat, one person pulling up their rod, another person going under to untangle lines.”

The harvested fish were 18 to 20 pounds each. The highly migratory, warm-water species has metallic scales, long, stiff pectoral fins that look like wings, and has a series of small “finlets” along the tail.

By the early afternoon, Ramp’s group had plugged their boat, pulled their lines and headed back to town. They immediately began to spread the word of their harvest, sharing where and how people could target the migratory fish.

Miller posted a chart on social media showing where tuna could be found and wrote out advice on how to target the fish.

“Starting the very next day, boats were heading out there, and I haven’t heard of anybody failing to catch tuna,” Ramp said. He’s heard of at least 20 boats fishing tuna this past week, and one boat with four anglers that harvested 45 fish in one day.

Miller and other charter guides advertised directed tuna fishing trips for hire last week.

Karen Johnson, a Sitka-based commercial fisherman, studied some of Ramp’s tuna stomachs under a microscope, and found the tiny beak of a small squid, a thin fish vertebrae, and a couple of parasites.

Because there is no allocation for tuna, and no conservation concerns for tuna off the Alaska coast, there is no limit on the amount of tuna that sport fishermen can harvest.

Tydingco, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game area management biologist, said news of the tuna harvest inspired “lots of questions, and lots of people out targeting them.”

Tuna fishing is not new in Southeast but has been mainly out of Prince of Wales Island, and doesn't happen every year, Tydingco said.

“Tuna, albacore especially, keep to a specific temperature band that sometimes gets close enough to target them (off of Southeast), sometimes it doesn’t,” he said.

“As boats have gotten bigger and better and faster and more reliable, getting off 20 to 30 miles offshore, something that used to be a prohibitive thing is something that can happen now,” he said.

“I’m fairly confident that people will continue to try, but it’s not something that anglers will be able to predictably rely on,” Tydingco said. “I don’t think that this will be an opportunity that folks will be able to take advantage of every year. “