THE August doldrums; warm, calm and we are in the throes of that apathy.

The fish are slowing up and most of the local anglers are behaving in a similar manner. It's not that there aren't any fish but one must suspect that the effort slackens off considerably as a result of the heat and the fact that a fair proportion of locals are off the Island.

Contrary to popular opinion, the fishing can be quite good; it just takes a bit of a shift on the part of the angler. Try leaving a bit earlier or plan on staying a bit later. Many fish, particularly the tuna are definitely likely to avoid the heat of midday and chumming at noon is just likely to encourage the barracuda and tiger sharks. Both of these will give you a pull on just about any tackle but you can hardly call that productive fishing.

Any quick analysis of the fishing at the moment is that things are slow but there is plenty to suggest otherwise. Chumming for blackfin tuna should be at its very best and there are enough Allisons around to please casual chummers. As has been the case there is no shortage of small game as the acks and rainbow runners have seemingly taken up residence all along the edge of the Banks.

Oceanic wandering in search of something floating is also a way of providing a diversion. The fact that there are some dolphin around suggests that they have found their way here by following some sort of flotsam.

The main event on the horizon is the annual Mid- Ocean News Wahoo Tournament. Not only is this arguably the most popular tournament of the year, it is certainly the event that snaps everyone back to the reality that the sport fishing season is rapidly coming to a conclusion. Something like school starting again with Halloween being the next occasion for celebration.

Wahoo are an interesting quarry in and of themselves. For starters there are lots of places where game fishing is big but wahoo are virtually unknown. For instance the East coast of the United States has all kinds of deep sea fishing with marlin and tuna leading the hit parade. For even the boats that make the run at the Gulf Stream or canyons, wahoo are a bit of an oddity.

Further south, off Florida and in the Gulf, they are more common but there is much more action from one of the hoo's relatives, the kingfish (or king mackerel), leaving the wahoo as an occasional.

Down in the Caribbean where all the talk is about kingfish, the fish in

question is almost always a wahoo. There are commercial fisheries down in St. Lucia and Barbados where the wahoo figures significantly but, name wise, gets little mention with the term kingfish being used to describe the wahoo caught there. Add to this the fact that kingfish really do occur there and the situation gets a bit hazy.

Offshore islands, like Madeira, conjure up visions of countless wahoo and, to be sure, the Hawaiian Islands and Bermuda fit into this category.

Surprisingly, Madeira actually gets very few wahoo. Also in the eastern

Atlantic, the Cape Verde Islands get quite a few wahoo fairly consistently

but it is several of the African continental countries that really rack up

wahoo landings. The South Pacific islands have wahoo as regulars but the archipelago of the Philippines which looks like wahoo heaven, gets precious few. There is another wahoo-like species, the tanguigue, which makes up for the lack. Other wahoo hotspots are the Gulf of Thailand, a vast area of relatively shallow water and the flat-bottom area between Venezuela and Trinidad. Add to this vast but sporadic distribution, the fact that wahoo occur in all the tropical/semi-tropical oceans of the world and often show seasonal migration patterns.

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