By Paul Lebowitz

Jon Schwartz is done fishing from sportboats.

“God forbid you get a fish less than 200 pounds. On that gear you don’t even feel it. It’s like having sex with four rubbers on,” Jon Schwartz said, derisively dismissing the typical fishing charter experience.

“That’s not for me. I want the most ‘unprotected’ fishing I can get. I want to feel everything. I want craziness and barely controlled bedlam,” Schwartz growled in his nasally voice.

Jumping on a sit-on-top kayak does the trick. “It’s as close as you can get to the fish other than swimming,” Schwartz said.

STARKIST EAT YOUR HEART OUT, 111-LBS OF PRIME AHI PHOTO COURTESY BLUEWATER JON.COM

A quest to battle the ocean’s ‘biggest and baddest’ fish took Schwartz to Hawaii’s fabled Kona Coast in summer 2005, a place he calls the land of the giants.

And the nastiest, toughest fish is what? A shark? Not according to the crew-cut Schwartz, who in some alternate reality is a mellow elementary school teacher in suburban San Diego.

“If you talk to fishermen who go after the toughest battles, who don’t just say ‘Oh it kicked my butt,’ but ‘I had to use special gear because it kicked my ass so much,’ its tuna. Pound for pound they’re much more efficient fighters,” Schwartz said.

Schwartz threw his kayak onto the New Horizon. The powerful motor-yacht whisked him miles offshore to the fish. Huh? Isn’t that cheating? No way, said Schwartz.

“I’m only there once a year for a couple of days. I had to even the odds of hooking a tuna or else it’s a wasted trip,” Schwartz explained, and then equated using the boat to Laird Hamilton grabbing a tow into a gnarly wave. Who cares anyway? Schwartz doesn’t see his adventures as some sort of lame competition.  

Schwartz connected with a beast. “It was tug, tug, tug for 25 minutes. To land a tuna you have to take away his will to live,” said Schwartz.

When the big yellowfin popped to the surface and started whipping the water beside the kayak into a froth, Schwartz realized he could be in trouble. “It was like being lashed to a bull, and there were two huge hooks about to tear into my hand. The fish could’ve pulled me down and drowned me. It was wild!” Schwartz said.

Schwartz held on until the fish’s energy finally failed. When he put it on a scale it pegged out at an impressive 111 pounds. “It was perfect size. Any more and something would have had to break in my favor. Now a 300-pound tuna, that’d be like an earthquake!” Schwartz said.

Catch the adventures of Bluewater Jon aka Jon Schwartz on his new DVD, Bluewater Jon and the Giant Tuna.