The Pelagic Plague

Anglers have everything to gain from a CITES listing. Yankee fly rodders who experienced the incredible run of two-year-old bluefins in 2005 (and I’m one of them) got a taste of what the fishery could be. On my best day off Point Judith, Rhode Island, I hooked 14 and landed 12, all between 20 and 35 pounds (See “Bluefin Summer,” FR&R, July/Oct 2006).

These fish taught me that 20-pound tippets aren’t enough because even baby bluefins can bust them with zero rod pressure merely by dragging line and backing at warp speed. Bluefins are warm-blooded, überfish with horizontal stabilizers jutting from the caudal peduncle, fins that fold into groves during speed bursts of 55 mph, double-hinged jaws that swing the mouth out as well as open and immense gills through which water is not pumped, as with lesser fish, but pushed by forward motion as with ramjets. No finer fly-rod fish swims. Our bluefin summer of four years ago could be an annual event. But now that great year class has been fished down; survivors weigh between 150 and 200 pounds; and thanks largely to longliners there are few fly-rod-size fish coming along.

For this we can offer special thanks to ICCAT, a sorry gaggle of fish-mongers and politicians derisively and deservedly called the “International Commission to Catch All the Tunas.”

“It’s time to try something new,” remarks Pew’s Lee Crockett. “ICCAT has done a terrible job. Do you keep banging your head against the wall with these guys or do you try something different? Maybe a CITES listing is the club you need to get their attention.” Dr. Russell Nelson, who on Gulf of Mexico tuna issues works for the Coastal Conservation Association, calls the CITES proposal “an acknowledgement of the failure of ICCAT to take sufficient actions to reduce bluefin tuna harvest, especially of eastern stock.”

It’s not as if a ban on longlining is going to be a major hardship for the commercial-fishing industry. Longlining was never an easy way to make a living; and, as it has fished down the food chain, profits have dwindled. Currently the average Atlantic longliner loses $7,000 a year. And there are plenty of safe alternatives that will protect the resource for everyone, including commercial fishermen.

“Greensticking,” for example, is a selective and extremely efficient method of trolling for tuna developed by the Japanese in the early 1980s. The fiberglass or graphite stick (originally green but now any color) elevates and tows a heavy “bird” about 400 yards behind the boat. The bird has the dual function of serving as a teaser and keeping the mainline taught so the attached squid lures can properly fly in and out of the water. Airborne tuna blast them, break the “tag line” from the stick, and are then winched to the boat.

The old harpoon fishery for swordfish and bluefin tuna produced a much higher catch than longlining does today. Longlining may be more efficient than harpooning or even greensticking when populations are healthy, but the point is this: It makes populations unhealthy.

That helps no one and hurts everyone.

Ted Williams has written about conservation for this magazine for more than two decades. His latest book is Something’s Fishy; order it at flyrodreel.com.