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SEAWORTHY
Tuna Wishing
The next time you eat sushi, consider this.
By Carl Safina
In 1985, my friends and I ventured my little 18-foot outboard boat
15 miles south of Montauk to an area called the Butterfish Hole,
and anchored in 150 feet of water. When I was sure the anchor had
caught, I secured the line and glanced at my watch. Six a.m.
My friend John started throwing pieces of fish into the tide. I
put a piece on a hook and instructed John’s wife, Nancy, to strip
16 arm-lengths of line from the reel, letting the bait drift out of
sight, before engaging the reel’s brake. At the instant I heard her
click the brake into position, the rod bent double and—despite
the brake—line started shrieking off the reel while Nancy gamely
hung on. We all looked wild-eyed into each other’s youthful faces.
Could there really be that many tuna here? Yes, there could.
By 8 a.m., nine tuna ranging from 30 to 100 pounds jammed
our big coolers. Other tuna were coursing awesomely through the
blue water behind the boat, eating every piece of fish we threw. We
were now just hand-feeding wild yellowfins, albacore and juvenile
bluefins. Having caught enough to make—as I now realize—a
lifetime memory, we decided to haul anchor hours early, getting
back to the dock in time for a late breakfast. By late afternoon my
kitchen table was piled high with tuna steaks. Friends’ cars were
pulling up to the house as my outdoor grill was getting hot. We ate
seared yellowfin and raw bluefin tuna until we couldn’t pop one
more bite of sashimi.
As the submarginal size of my little boat for open-ocean fishing
implies, we—not quite out of our 20s—were pretty new at tuna
fishing. No matter. We went where everyone else went, and back
then it never occurred to us we’d ever need to go more than 15
miles from shore. We had no way to foresee how much the ocean
would change.
A year or two later, Japanese buyers arrived on the docks, and
as the globalized market hit home, things indeed changed. One
morning offshore amidst a dense fleet of boats slaughtering large
numbers of bluefin tuna, someone got on the radio and suggested
that maybe we all should leave a few for tomorrow. Crackling
through the speaker came this reply from a recreational fisherman:
“Hey, nobody left any buffalo for me.”
In 1995, with a new boat, I slowed not 15 miles but 50 miles
from shore. Bluefin tuna had become scarce, but word was of
large numbers of yellowfins. We stopped to drift at the edge of a
wide group of boats, and I set out two baited lines while, again,
my friends started throwing handfuls of small fish into the sea.
As I was setting out a third line, we suddenly hooked three tuna.
Photograph: Courtesy of Carl Safina
LIEB FAMILY CELLARS
high summer 2008 edible EAST END 51 Again I stacked my table with delicious fresh tuna steaks, friends
converged and the grill worked overtime.
But there’s a big difference between having to go 15 miles or
50. The trend was clear, and there weren’t many more days with
so many fish. Soon the fish—smaller, scarcer—were out of my
new boat’s range, not worth investing in yet a bigger boat to chase
them. And so a thing that I loved most in my life became a thing
mainly of the past, the heart-pounding and adrenaline reduced to
mere memory, as if the road traveled consisted mainly of what’s
visible in the rear-view mirror. In the billion-year-plus history of
life in the seas, two decades is a millisecond, but, wow, how the
world has changed.
Now, the great tuna runs of the South Shore of Long Island
are in the past. Montauk’s autumn “tuna fever” broke over the last
six years or so. But no one feels better.
Tuna fishing now is an offshore shot, usually to the edge of the
shelf—75 miles—or to even more distant seafloor canyons notched
into the slope to the north. It’s about big boats, astronomical fuel
budgets, long hours and fewer, smaller fish.
For me, the thrill vanished along with the fish, because the
ocean’s abundance was the source of my exhilaration. According
to a recent article in Nature, catch rates for large fish have declined
throughout most of the world by an average of roughly 90
percent.
The magnificent bluefin tuna that so thrilled me—they can
reach more than a thousand pounds—are now rare. After years
of too-high quotas sustained by lobbying by tuna exporters, the
catch has gone through the floor; the whole U.S. fleet has caught
only 10–15 percent of its quota in the last couple of years. The
last of the true giants are also getting killed on both ends of their
annual trek. Boats using 25-mile “long lines” with thousands of
hooks still kill giant bluefin tuna while they’re spawning in the
Gulf of Mexico, and the last significant group of really big bluefin
tuna are also getting killed on the north end of their migration, in
Canada. Along the U.S. coast, recreational anglers kill about 15
juvenile bluefin for every adult killed by commercial boats. It’s no
surprise that bluefin tuna spawning is now also collapsing. Failures
of management, all ostensibly to avoid economic pain, inevitably
lead to economic collapses anyway.
The stories from before my time speak of unfathomable losses,
of a sea that so swarmed with life no one now venturing forth
can really imagine it. In my time, marlin and albacore and big
52 edible EAST END high summer 2008
sharks were prizes—but some people once avoided them. I met
an old gentleman who, as a youth, ignored all the marlin he saw,
so as not to miss a chance at a swordfish. (Marlin were common
in my youth, but, despite years of fishing where men once made
livings harpooning premium “Block Island swordfish,” I have
never seen one of these great gladiators in my home waters. Now
we see no marlin, either.) I met a man who in his prime was so
intent on bigeye tuna that he’d reel in his lures and run from
acres of albacore. (Nowadays, a few albacore in six or eight hours
of trolling, 80 miles from shore, is considered “a good trip” by
people who know no better.) I met a man formerly employed to
spot swordfish from a plane. So plentiful were the sharks that they
made the swordfish hard to spot. (The spotter planes are gone, and
the sharks—once spurned in their abundance and now targeted in
their scarcity—get ever rarer.) The stories of bygone plenitude read
like fairy tales, yet they are the experiences of people still alive.
Too soon they will pass into memory. And then the memories
themselves will be forgotten.
I’ve witnessed the decline of many big-fish populations, but
I’ve also seen how problems can be reversed when people work
at it. One of the reasons I’d started venturing offshore for tuna
was the decline of near-shore fishing. In 1985, the same year we
caught all those tuna in my little boat, I fished all night during the
October full moon in one of the very best striped bass haunts on
the coast, but could not find a fish. During that mid-’80s nadir,
fishery managers finally got tough, closing the fishery temporarily,
instituting quotas and raising minimum sizes to allow females to
lay more eggs. It worked. When I went for striped bass recently,
we started fishing when the sun went down and began catching
20-pound fish within minutes. It made for a short night, under
two hours of satisfying fishing when, with two fat bass on ice and
others released, we headed in.
The plunge of tuna and the collapse of the magnificent bluefin
tuna caused by negligent managers, juxtaposed against the world’s
best fishery turnaround—the striped bass—illustrate something
I’ve learned: When people defend their fishing, their fishing gets
worse; when they defend their fish, their fishing gets good.
Carl Safina lives in Amagansett and directs the Blue Ocean Institute, a
global ocean conservation group. His books include Song for the Blue
Ocean, Eye of the Albatross and Voyage of the Turtle. He will be
contributing a regular column on the ethics of our seafood choices.