Bluefishing Tourney Winner Looking for a Repeat

Eric Huner feels like he’s been challenged. You might think that fellow anglers are giving him lip about called the Greatest Bluefishing Tournament on Earth.

That may be true. In fact, when he left the offices of the sponsor of the tournament after taking the mandatory lie-detector test to prove he did in fact catch the winning fish, Huner remembers bumping into the second place angler (whose fish he beat by less than a tenth of a pound.) 

“He gave a dirty look,” said Huner who admitted it was all in good fun.

But the competition is the least of his worries right now. 

“My wife says to me ‘what do you mean you can’t win? You fish all the time. You fish so much. Who knows more than you?’” Huner told us in a recent interview.

With that kind of pressure on him, Huner says he’s fishing harder than ever to try to do what no one has ever done before: win the WICC bluefishing tournament two years in a row.

“No one in the history of this contest, no one has won twice,” he said. “The odds are against me.”

With more than 4,000 people registered for the tournament from all over the Long Island Sound, Huner thinks that maybe ten percent of them are hardcore fishermen. That’s still about 400 people out there with skills he needs to beat.

Originally from Syracuse, Huner came down to Long Island to go to school at Stony Brook University. He did his graduate work at C.W. Post. He’s now a registered dietician with his own business called Huner’s Fitness Advantage in East Setauket where he’s lived for the last 20 years.

Huner is 41 years old and he started fishing when he was five.

“My older brother and grandfather loved to fish,” he said. “Wherever I went where there was water I had a fishing pole with me.”

He started fishing the freshwater lakes in upstate New York but then when he came to Long Island he’d go out on the local party boats. After 15 years he finally got his own boat. He now owns a 21-foot center console Trophy named “Tangled up in Blue II.” (He had a bigger boat with the same name but recently downsized.)

Huner may live and work in East Setauket but his fishing is all about Port Jefferson. He purchased his boat in Port Jefferson and the only place he launches it is from the in the village.

His winning fish from last year’s tournament was weighed in at .

“We put it on the scale and watched it,” he said. “It (the scale) creeped up. That was the moment I knew it was in first place.”

The Greatest Bluefishing Tournament on Earth is usually a weekend event at the end of August where anyone fishing in the Long Island Sound can enter. Official weigh stations are located all over the Sound from the North Fork to New York City and up and around the Connecticut coast. This year’s tournament will be Saturday, Aug. 27 and Sunday, Aug. 28.

Last year, Huner said he caught the winning fish on Sunday at about 11 a.m after a weekend where he “probably caught about 30 fish.”

“They were all big fish,” he said. “Between 30 to 34 inches.”

But Huner was waiting for the really big one. He said he knew that he needed to pull in a 36-inch fish to be in the running. It happened Sunday morning.

“When I pulled it up, I looked at it and I thought it may be a winning fish,” he said.

Huner called his wife to check the standings to see how big the lead fish was.

“At that point there was a 15.89 pound fish,” he said.

You’d think that he’d race in with what he thought was the winner but Huner continued fishing for three more hours.

“I kept it in my live well with fresh water pumping in to keep it alive and hydrated,” he said.

They weighed it at about 2:30 p.m. at Caraftis. When they cut it open they found the stomach was empty.

“It could have been a 17-pound fish,” said Huner.

It weighed 15.994 pounds. Good enough to win the $25,000 grand prize.

After taking his polygraph test at the Connecticut office of the sponsor, he received a check in the mail a few weeks later.

“No cash in the briefcase,” he said jokingly.

What did he do with the money?

“I have one kid in college and college is expensive,” he said. “I put it in the bank as a cushion to have a little extra. I didn’t go out and take a trip somewhere.”

For this year’s competition Huner says he feels good. He’s physically conditioned and he says he’s planning to fish harder than he has for the past few years.

“It’s only a day and three quarters,” he said. “I don’t need sleep.”

Although he has high hopes, he knows the odds are stacked against him.

“It’s unreasonable to win two years in a row,” he said. “If you’re in the top 20 it proves you know where the fish are.”

And where are the fish?

“I can’t tell you,” he said.