To anyone who has been fishing offshore for a long time—in
my case, since the late 1970s—one of the most striking trends has to be been
the shrinking, and overall decline, of the canyon tunas.
By “canyon tunas,” I mean the fish that are also called the “tropical”
or “BAYS Complex” tunas, including the Bigeye, Albacore, Yellowfin
and Skipjack. We still catch a few here on Long Island, very occasionally in good numbers, but if you weren’t on the water three decades ago, you really
don’t know how good fishing for those tunas could be.
I’m calling them “canyon tunas” here, but back in the ‘80s,
you didn’t have to run all the way to the canyons to find them.
Skipjack, the smallest of the four, were
frequently caught within sight of the beach, on and inside the 15-fathom
line. Mostly, we caught them by
accident, when they jumped on lures we
were trolling for something else, but sometimes, when things were quiet inshore,
we’d put out a spread of feathers, cedar jigs and small plastic lures, and
catch plenty of skipjack on light trolling gear without spending much money on
fuel.
Even when you weren’t targeting them, they were hard to
avoid, and that wasn’t always a bad thing, because the spotting the splashes
from feeding skipjack schools were often the key to finding larger tuna that
were chasing the same baitfish farther below the surface. Back in ’94, we won one of Long Island’s
larger fishing tournaments with a bluefin that we put in the box before 8:00 in
the morning on the first day of the event—a fish that was twice the size of
anything else put on the scales that weekend—because we stopped short of our
original destination and dropped in on a school of skipjack that was betraying the presence of larger fish below.
Today, there are still a few skipjack around, but they are nowhere
near as common as they were years ago.
While they’re still fairly abundant out near the canyons, you can troll
for a very long time inside the 30-fathom line without seeing one. Although I spent most of my offshore time
shark fishing this season, I did spend a few days trolling inshore for mahi during late August and early September—typically prime skipjack time--and never had any
of those little tunas strike one of my lures.
The story of yellowfin tuna is largely the same.
Back in the ‘80s, they were common
inshore. A 67-pound yellowfin was actually
the first tuna that I ever caught from my own boat, a 20-foot Sea Ox powered by
a single 115 horesepower outboard--which certainly wasn’t a canyon boat, and provides
a pretty good idea of how close to shore the yellowfin were. The next year, I landed one of nearly 100
pounds right on the 20-fathom line; there was no need to run far for quality
fish.
But the quality fish were there. As I was writing this, I pulled a copy of the
Babylon [Long Island, New York] Tuna Club’s 1985 Journal from my bookcase. It listed the three largest yellowfin
caught by club members in the previous year; the fish weighed 199, 160 and 144
pounds. Compared to those fish, my
67-pounder, caught in the same year, was a runt.
Today, it would have been a giant.
The club that I belong to now, South Shore
Marlin and Tuna, fishes the same waters that the Babylon Tuna Club did, and
it also keeps records of its members' three largest yellowfin of the year. The 2018 results: 57 pounds was the largest, followed by a 51.3
and a 48.
When fish are trending that much smaller, and fishermen have
to run farther and try a lot harder to catch them, it’s clear that the stock is
not doing too well.
Albacore seem to be on the same sort of downward trend.
They used to be the day-savers, the fish that
you caught in the canyons when the more interesting fish—the yellowfin, bigeyes
and billfish—had lockjaw, and they used to be the fish that you cursed when the
others were around but the “longfins,” a name they earned with their oversized
pectorals, hit four, five or more lures at a time, leading to chaos in undermanned cockpits and causing tangles that halted efforts to chase larger
game until all of the snarls were cleared.
That sort of thing happened quite often, even in the early
days of this 21st Century, but it rarely occurs today. Back in ’84, the Babylon Tuna
Club’s the top three albacore weighed
between 50 and 55 pounds. But this year,
the folks at South Shore Marlin, despite their faster, long-ranged boats,
caught no longfin albacore at all…
But the fate of the bigeye tuna may be the biggest tragedy
of all. They’re the largest of all BAYS
tunas, reaching a maximum
weight of at least 400 pounds. They have always been a primary target of canyon anglers, big enough and tough enough to pose a
physical challenge, scarce enough to be prized and--at least in the past--available enough to be a
real possibility on every trip out to “The Edge.”
When I first fished the canyons in the 1980s,
most boats refused to fish anything lighter than 50-pound gear, lest a bigeye hooked
on a lighter outfit prove impossible to bring to the boat.
Stories abounded of “wolf packs” of bigeye coming up and
hitting multiple lures behind the boat—they often struck in that fashion—and captains
bragged about going “four for four” or “five for six” after successfully
fighting and landing most, if not all, of the bigeye that hit at the same
time.
A 166-pound bigeye earned our
first first-place tournament win, and the last check we cashed, before we quit
competitive fishing, was for a 144 that finished in second place behind a
175. None of those were big bigeye. The New York State record is a 355
pound fish caught in 1981, while the International
Game Fish Association lists a 392 pound, 6 ounce tuna as the largest Atlantic
bigeye ever caught on rod and reel.
But bigeye, like the other BAYS tunas, are getting scarcer and
shrinking.
Again going back to the Babylon Tuna Club's records, in 1994, members landed
bigeye of 243.5, 190 and 161 pounds. In
the 2018 season, South Shore Marlin and Tuna Club members, fishing the same
waters that the Babylon anglers—and the
New York State record holder—did, couldn’t do any better than fish of 112,
108.5 and 102.7.
Unfortunately, the decline in the Atlantic bigeye isn’t just
happening off Long Island, and it isn’t likely to get any better at any time
soon.
The problem, which should come as a surprise to no one, is
overfishing. Although bigeye aren’t as
well-known as the iconic Atlantic bluefin tuna, they
actually support a more valuable commercial fishery, one which larger fish
are caught for high-value sushi and retail tuna markets, while smaller fish are
netted in bulk and prosaically canned.
“This species is in the red.”
There is no doubt why that is the case. Paulus Tak, an officer of the Pew Charitable
Trusts who serves as an advisor at ICCAT, concisely described the problem when
he said that
“Bottom line, there are simply too many boats in the water
chasing too few fish.”
That is going to be a continuing problem.
In 2015, ICCAT established a 65,000 metric ton annual quota
for Atlantic bigeye, and closed certain areas to bigeye tuna fishing. However, that quota only applied to the seven
largest bigeye harvesting nations; additional landings by other countries
pushed the total landings to at least 80,000 metric tons, an unsustainable
amount.
Even that proposal was more liberal than the advice
provided by many scientists, who said that reducing annual landings to 50,000
metric tons, would give the stock a 70% chance of recovering within
10 years.
But even the more generous, more drawn-out rebuilding
proposal failed to gain ICCAT’s approval.
Despite the fact that the
bigeye population has declined to just 20% of its historic abundance, ICCAT
ultimately decided to extend the current 65,000 metric ton quota, applicable to
only seven nations, for another year, although it did place some restrictions
on the use of FADs.
“The industry wants to make money and in the quickest way it
can.”
While members
of the conservation community were predictably upset with ICCAT’s decision,
at least some members
of the commercial fishing industry were upset, too. European purse seiners have apparently seen
the writing on the wall, and understand that if their industry is to remain healthy,
it needs a healthy bigeye stock.
Europeche set forth the industry’s position when it noted that
“the industry was willing to accept, inter alia, a reduction
in the total allowable catch for bigeye tuna, a reduction in the number of active
fish aggregating devices (FADs) per vessel, and an extension of the fishing
moratorium on FADs to the entire convention area for two months.”
At the same time, Europeche’s statement also reflected the
sort of infighting that apparently subordinated the fate of the bigeye to local interests, and prevented an accord.
“However, we regret that some ICCAT contracting parties,
particularly the Asian countries, have opposed the adoption of such measures
aimed at the quick recovery of the stock.
Those states advocated unfair measures solely affecting European purse
seiners which only represent 33% of bigeye catches in the Atlantic, while
rejecting the adoption of the slightest measure to restrict the activity of
Asian longliners which account for nearly 50% of the catches.”
“Everyone is to blame for this one. Each individual member is more concerned with
its own priorities than finding consensus on a real recovery plan.”
But, given the outcome of ICCAT’s deliberations on bigeye, perhaps
Adam Baske, policy and outreach director of another commercial fishing
organization the International Pole & Line Foundation, gave the best
summary of all.
“People say that ICCAT has failed, but the commission is
merely the body that reflects the will of its members. Some members clearly don’t care about the
future of this fishery because it’s not their target species. It shows that ICCAT is completely incompetent
when it comes to the effective management of tropical tunas.”
Given the decline in the tropical tunas fishery that I’ve
seen in the past thirty years, I cannot disagree.
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