Mid-Summer Fishing Adventures

Mid-summer was one of Capt. Michael Hurt’s favorite times of the year. It’s when the tuna bite off Southern California, grounds he pioneered as a sportfishing captain, turned to billfish. Finning swordfish were his favorite. The La Jolla native’s commercial stint finding and fighting these big fish came in the 1970s. Spotter planes were illegal back then, so it was all about finding them finning on the surface without eyes in the sky.

“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Hurt said. “You never took your eyes off the water because if you did, you could miss out on thousands of dollars.” He’d take food and water for the day up to the bucket, an enclosed tower set up like a mini-flybridge that made it more comfortable. “You’d even have a bottle to pee in up in the tower so you wouldn’t have to leave,” he added. He’d head some 300 miles offshore, and for days at a time on the La Donna, a 50-foot west coast custom plywood boat with a 45-foot-long plank to help sneak up on swords as you sighted in with the 12-foot harpoon.

Sometimes he’d have to run to the sport fleet that was closer to shore for supplies. Maybe it was for bait, food, or miscellaneous things that would help him extend the trip. “So, I was coming in over the horizon one time,” Hurt said, “and somebody said on the radio, ‘Hey, isn’t that your cuz coming in?’ Everyone knew I would stand on top of the pilot chair in the wheelhouse, slide the hatch open, and look out. So, my cousin says ‘Yeah, it looks like a big beak sticking out of the top of the boat.’ That’s how I got the nickname ‘Beak’.” The moniker stuck. In 2018, Mike ‘Beak’ Hurt received the IFGA’s prestigious Tommy Gifford Award for being one of the first captains to catch billfish consistently off his home west coast waters with no technology other than his eagle-eye prowess.

The Early Years in La Jolla

Beak was the third generation of his family born and raised in the beach community of La Jolla, a neighborhood of San Diego. His mom’s side of the family, the Bohannon’s, ran the Bird Rock Inn. Her brothers, Beak’s uncles, took their skiffs out daily and brought back species such as sea bass, bonito, barracuda, yellowtail, and cod. They also picked abs (abalone) and trapped lobster. The Inn was one of the first restaurants to offer these delicacies. The menu caught the attention of the group building Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of Saint Louis in San Diego. They would all come in and eat lobster. Beak’s grandmother, pregnant at the time, was so excited when Lindberg came in to dine the night before setting out for his historic flight across the Atlantic, she told him that she would name her newborn Charles Lindberg Bohannon. Young Charles was the first baby to be named while Lindberg was making his famous Atlantic crossing. Charles eventually became a Colonel in the Air Force, while his brother, Jack ‘Bud’ Bohannon, became a professional fisherman.

Early Fishing Adventures

“When I was a kid, I fished a lot with my uncle on what was a headboat or sportboat that carried 30 to 60 people,” Hurt said. “My cousin Chris and I would get up in the middle of the night and jump on as ‘dead heads’. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t wait to get down to the docks. We fished for free, then helped do the cleanup work at the day’s end. That’s how a lot of young kids got to go fishing in those days, back in the 50s and 60s. Well, I’d always get seasick. Come morning, when the first fish would hit the deck, I’d jump out of my bunk, run out, and try to catch some fish. That was my favorite thing to do; catch a lot of fish. What I called getting your pole bent and string pulled. When it settled down, I’d be back in my bunk seasick.

“When I got a little older, I worked on sportboats during the spring and summer,” Hurt continued. “That’s where I really got the fever. It was so exciting. Around midnight, thousands of anglers would be buzzing around the docks, laughing and carrying on telling stories of past catches and prognostications of what daybreak would bring. They’d stow their tackle boxes and bundle of rods on one of the hundreds of boats that were headed over the horizon to hunt for the ‘chicken of the sea’, the albacore tuna.”

Beak also fished with his father aboard the Lucille. He still remembers his first catch at age four. Lucille was anchored in the back bay behind Shelter Island when Beak got hooked up and pulled around by a ‘mud marlin.’ It put up one heck of a fight. It was just a ray, but the moniker earned Beak early notoriety as a marlin fisherman.

From Vietnam to Professional Sportfishing Captain

As a young man, Beak served a tour of duty in Vietnam and then came back and resumed his studies at San Diego State College. Before he left for the war, becoming a professional fisherman wasn’t part of his mindset. Afterward, back in college, a classmate who knew of his fondness for fishing got him a deckhand job on a private boat, a classic Norseman, the Majestic. That winter he was asked to help deliver movie director John Frankenheimer’s yacht, Reel One, to the then-little-known fish camp at the tip of Baja California, Cabo San Lucas. They left in the cold rain and arrived days later at ‘lands end’ with hot sun and flat calm seas. On the first day, Beak caught 10 different kinds of fish, from blue and striped marlin, sailfish, wahoo, tuna and dorado. He thought it was an amazing place.

“After college, I had a small marketing business for a product that was selling well,” Hurt said. “Nothing to do with fishing. But I was gone too much, and it ruined my first marriage. So, I said ‘Screw it, I’m going to take a break and go fishing.’ I’m still on that break.” Family connections landed him a position on commercial boats, fishing mostly for albacore and swordfish. The multi-day, offshore trips taught Beak how to fix things that broke so he could stay out longer. The time on the water also taught him how to find fish.

Navigating the Vast West Coast Waters

“Back then, in the 70s, there was no satellite imaging or anything else to help you figure out where the fish are,” Hurt said. “Compared to a lot of other places I’ve fished, we here on the west coast have such a vast ocean to fish. It’s not like going to a drop-off where you can go consistently. It’s too big of an area. There’s a lot of structure too. Darrell Lowrance used to love coming over here and working with Fathometers because we had so much structure. And it was all right there. We didn’t have to go very far. Our shelf drops off to 100 fathoms quickly. Lots of structure with peaks and valleys creating food chains that are constantly changing.”

The SoCal-Cabo Seasons

Commercial fishing in the spring and summer led to an opportunity to help get a private boat ready to take down to Cabo in the winter. “I hadn’t planned on giving up the sword fishing, but I had such a great experience in Cabo that the owners asked me to run their boat locally up in Newport Beach,” Hurt said. “So that pulled me back into the private boat world.” He stayed in this world through the 70s and 80s.

One of the owners he worked for had one of the biggest Budweiser distributorships west of the Mississippi. Beak was instructed to carry no less than 25 cases of beer on the boat. At the end of the month, he had to replace the old beer. It made him the most popular boat on the dock. That was the Draw One, then he worked on the custom 60-foot Elliott Sea Mark, a position he held for eight years. That’s when he got much of his recognition as a marlin fisherman with many tournament successes. As soon as hurricane season was over each season, he’d head south to Cabo. They’d stop in Magdalena Bay, way before anyone called it a ‘bucket list’ stop.

“Teaching people is really what I’d enjoy doing and Mag Bay was one of the best pools of fish to teach anglers how to catch marlin,” Hurt said. “Spot the fish, present the bait, feel the bite, and set the hook. Not winding in a ‘jig’ fish, but a bait fish. In Southern California, the average guy would get maybe 10 chances to hook up to a marlin in a season. Down there, you’d get 10 to 100 chances in a day. My wife pulled on 24 stripers in a day.”

Beak fished in, and won, most of the SoCal and Cabo billfishing tournaments at the time. “The only tournament that ever evaded me was the big one, the Bisbee Black & Blue,” he said. “We fished it from the beginning. I won a lot of money in the brown

 bags when we’d bet amongst ourselves. He was an early advocate of conservation and was a big part of the how-to in developing release tournaments. Beak also helped popularize the use of gyro binoculars. These were especially helpful in spotting tailing marlin or finning swordfish, a common west coast fishery phenomenon.

Innovations and Conservation Efforts

He also worked with early bait tube prototypes. Football Hall of Famer, Lance ‘Bambi’ Alworth, had fished with Kona legend, Bart Miller. He noted his makeshift contraption that kept a skipjack tuna alive until it was deployed as a live bait in a spot he deemed right. “We initially crafted them with PCV pipe and nylon funnels,” Hurt said. Daniel Alvarez worked on creating the original bait tubes, which were made for Cabo. Now, big-game boats around the world have bait systems with tubes.

Fame’s Many Paths

When Beak came back from Cabo in the mid-80s, he started his own business, Beak & Associates. The plan was to help people better enjoy the boating experience, to guide them in all phases of boating: Purchasing, outfitting, captaining, and fishing their boat. Ultimately, having too many boats clamor for his star fishing capability at one time, especially for tournaments, plus a hefty liability with ‘associates,’ led him to a media and consulting career instead.

“I first became involved with magazines through Deborah Hood, Marlin magazine’s West Coast advertising executive,” Hurt said. She tried to introduce the magazine to the west coast. At the time, the east coast and west coast fishing worlds were like two different countries. She became my mentor in the magazine world. We’d go to the shows together, her in advertising and me as the west coast editor. I got to see people and in turn, was invited to many places around the world. One was to St. Thomas, where I met Win Rockefeller, of The Billfish Foundation, in the 1980s. I enjoyed working with him in the early years of the foundation.”

Competing in International Tournaments

In 1992, Beak was honored to be asked to compete in the Hawaiian International Billfish Tournament (HIBT). He fished on a local team with legends, including IGFA Hawaii Rep, Bill Hoey on his 35 Merritt, Lady, Capt. Rod McGuckin, and Kona fishing icon, Phil Parker. It was the HIBT’s first year for release, and the team, Tournament Anglers – Hawaii, released four out of five hook-ups to win, and set a record for the five total. There weren’t direct flights from California to Kona at the time, so Beak traveled through Honolulu.

“So, there I was, walking down the terminal carrying these four big wooden trophies of fish and I had all these honorary leis strung around my neck,” he said. “It was a celebrated event. All these people looking at me, giving me a knowing look and the ‘shaka’ sign. When I pulled up to the desk at Continental Airlines, one of the tournament’s sponsors, they looked up at me and said, ‘You must be the big winner’. And with that they gave me two first-class seats, one for me and one for my trophies.”

Media Appearances and Contributions

Guesting on fishing radio shows was also in Beak’s media repertoire as was event and seminar speaking. In the mid-1990s, Beak hit the small screen as host of the 10-episode TV Show called “The Art of Fishing.” It featured well-known fisherman and artist, the late Chuck Byron, as he traveled to different fishing destinations, with pans from live-action marlin tail walking to Chuck sketching the scene in real-time.

Still Getting His Pole Bent & String Pulled

Beak never had his own boat. He’s always been a hired captain, and he’s loved it that way. Back at the turn of the millennium, one of his clients, Lance Keller, wanted to fish the Bisbee’s tournament. Beak told him his 46 Bertram needed a lot of work and wasn’t set up well enough to go to Cabo. So, the two kept an eye out for a rig to do the job and settled on a sturdy 54 Bertram, now named the Chiqelin. She became one of the most respected boats in the west, nearly 20 years ago.

“That’s been kind of like a family boat,” Hurt said. My wife Dianne, son Shane, grandkids and good friends go out with me on it and share my love for fishing. If you ask what’s on my bucket list, I feel that I have taken a bigger bite out of life than most and am truly blessed to have lived the best of times. But I would like to get a few more days on the water with family and friends. My son has the disease of liking to fish, making him the fourth generation in our family, and now he’s getting my nine-year-old grandson, Grayson, into fishing to carry on the tradition. I still need time to get my other grandkids salty.”

Dedication to Veterans and Conservation

Beak also participates annually in War Heroes on the Water, the largest non-profit sportfishing tournament dedicated to helping veterans heal from battle wounds. The tournament is held in September out of Newport Beach, California. Looking ahead, Beak’s eyes are on conservation. It’s a topic he’s advocated for his whole career, including working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in some of the early tagging studies to document the fishery and its stocks. “I’ve been part of a lot of fisheries management councils and committees and watching it over time,” he said. “What’s taken over, especially in the California fisheries, are protectionist rather than management-oriented strategies. That needs to change.”