HOOK, LINE AND SINKER

The fishermen were tired, but the bonita were still hungry.

“We’d all caught all we wanted, but they were just chomping on anything in the water,” charter boat crewman Dan Adams remembers of that fish-filled afternoon 14 years ago. For amusement, the men started snaring bonita with sandwich meat, gum wrappers--anything.

“It got to be a joke, so I just tied my retainer on a line and . . .” Adams, then 15, takes an imaginary cast, tossing 2 1/2 years of oral discomfort to the fishes.

“It was just ‘Thok,’ ” he clicks his tongue, “Pow!”

He reeled in the long-dead bonita, retainer lodged deep in its gullet.

“It was coming off in a week, anyway,” he shrugs.

So that’s how, at age 29, Dan Adams has straight teeth and a decent fish story.

Anglers cherish a good fish tale almost as much as a good catch. Garnished with a little classic fisherman’s embellishment, some become legendary.

Following are a few classics making the rounds at Orange County marinas:

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Capt. Don Brockman has 22 years of fish stories. None beat the tale of “Vodka Joe.”

Named for his ever-present 7-Up can full of spirits, Vodka Joe was a regular on Brockman’s 80-foot charter boat, Freelance, and an accomplished angler.

On a perfect day about two years ago, Brockman steered a boatload of anglers--Vodka Joe included--into a wicked mess of yellowtail. The group landed more than 100 fish that afternoon. Everyone except, that is, old Joe. His line broke. Fish spit out his hook.

“What can I do?” fishless Joe moaned to Brockman.

“I told him he had to get rid of ‘The Stink,’ ” Brockman says, dredging up an old fishing superstition. “I said, ‘Joe, you got to break the streak. You got two choices: You either have to sacrifice a chicken or burn your clothes.’ I didn’t think he’d have much luck getting a live chicken after 8 at night, so I told him his best bet was to burn his clothes.”

A few hours later, Joe’s wife called Brockman.

“She said, ‘I’m not sure what’s going on. Why is my husband sitting naked next to the barbecue watching his clothes burn?’ ” Brockman said, chuckling.

The next morning Joe was ready at the Balboa Pavilion dock in Newport Beach, vowing to throw his gear overboard if his ritual failed to break the streak. It was another fantastic day. The coolers on the Freelance again filled with yellowtail.

“I don’t think he even had a bite,” Brockman says. “We had guys with rent rods who caught five or six. Joe got nothing.”

True to his threat, Vodka Joe threw his rod overboard. And when he couldn’t break his tackle box loose (deckhands, expecting trouble, had glued it to the engine hatch), he picked out each individual hook, lure and line and hurled it into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

“He has not been back since,” Brockman says, shaking his head sadly. “And that was two years ago. We know he’s still alive because people still see him at the swap meet.”

“People,” Brockman adds, “are serious about their fishing.”

Odd Catch Proves to Be a Twin Killing

The 1997 saltwater fishin’ season already has taken on a kind of mythical quality. Warm El Nino waters brought fish to the waters off Orange County in record numbers. Lots of anglers went home happy.

Capt. Tom Patierno was enjoying one of those great days last summer on his boat Limitless.

Despite the vessel’s moniker, his passengers had caught their limits of dorado and yellowtail. Patierno set trolling lines for tuna and turned the boat back toward Dana Point.

They got a bite right off. As a passenger reeled in the catch, Patierno’s deckhand leaned over the side. “He thought he saw another fish,” Patierno said. “But it was real deep and he was the only one who could see it, so everyone was like, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”

Suddenly, the rod tip started quivering. Some of the fight went out of the fish. “It was strange,” Patierno recalls. “We thought maybe the line got caught on the propeller shaft. But the fish was still on the line, so we had him keep bringing it up.”

Finally, the deckhand was able to stick a gaff in the 80-pound tuna and pull it from the water. “Lo and behold there’s another one right under it,” Patierno laughs. “The line was wrapped around its tail. We caught both of them on one line.”

The second tuna, a 60-pounder, was facing the opposite direction of the first fish, which explained the strange quivering rod tip. The fish canceled each other out. “That was rare,” Patierno said.

The Whopper

Capt. Harry Hickock’s “sixpack” charter yacht Awesome isn’t as fast as some of the other boats at Dana Point Harbor, but it’s perfect for shark trolling between Dana Point and Catalina Island.

On one three-person shark charter not too long ago, his passengers dropped a large barracuda over the side on a double-hook rig and waited. A thresher shark took the bait. The rod bent and the reel screamed. The battle began.

“They’re a real strong fighting fish,” Hickock says. When hooked, thresher sharks tend to dive.

“Where we were fishing, the bottom was, oh, about 2,000 feet, so it took a while to pull it up.”

The three anglers fought the shark in 20 minute increments, wearily passing on the rod after their shift. Three hours and 20 minutes later, they finally pulled the shark into the boat. When they got back to the scales at Dana Point Harbor, the 14-foot shark weighed in at 301 pounds.

“A good heavy fish,” says the often understated Capt. Harry.

The Joker

Not all excursions end with a cooler full of fish. As old salts tell their charters, that’s why it’s called fishin’, not catchin’.

On days when the beer is plentiful and the fish are few, an angler’s mind turns to pranks.

Hosing down the deck of the Reel Fun at Dana Point Harbor, Stuart Sheldon remembers an afternoon a couple of years back when he and fellow crew members on another boat delivered a wicked payback to the boss’ son--a notorious prankster we’ll call the Joker.

It was a nice enough day, but they’d been skunked. Not a fish in the cooler. The Joker was snoozing in his deck chair with a cold beer at his side and a line set for tuna that just weren’t biting.

Sheldon and the crew carefully pulled in the Joker’s line by hand. They tied on a five-gallon bucket and lowered it over the side.

They had about five seconds to get clear before the fun started.

“All of the sudden his reel went crazy,” Sheldon says, chuckling at the memory of the groggy Joker struggling to get a grip as a monstrous catch sent his line screaming out to sea. “It felt just like a yellowtail or a big tuna,” Sheldon says. “None of us blew the joke. He fought it for about 45 minutes.”

The captain didn’t make things easier, using the boat to pull against the line instead of turning with “the fish.” But the Joker finally prevailed.

Weary from the fight, he craned his head to see the monster fish and saw he had bested a bucket.

They didn’t catch any fish that day, but the story was a keeper.