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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 5
January 2009
Cape bluefin surprise is ‘Christmas in November’
CHATHAM, MA – Cape Cod bluefin tuna fishermen got a big shot in the arm late this fall when, completely unexpectedly, huge schools of hungry giants showed up off Chatham.
“It was Christmas in November,” said Robert Fitzpatrick, president of Maguro America Inc., which handled many of the fish landed during the Nov. 7-15 bite. “We’re very happy it happened.”
Fitzpatrick explained that no one had landed any bluefin tuna for several weeks and most guys had given up and put their gear away. Then, that first Friday of November, after a stretch of bad weather, a few groundfish gillnetters gutting fish on “The Figs” noticed big bluefin coming up alongside their boats to eat the waste they were throwing overboard.
Saturday was beautiful, with calm seas. A half-dozen local boats rigged for tuna fishing showed up and practically had the ocean to themselves. They landed more than a dozen big fish among them that day.
More and more fishermen joined in as the week went on. Fitzpatrick estimated that as many as 70 boats participated on a single day in the fishery that was pretty much concentrated about 28 miles off Chatham.
While fishermen making their way home landed a few giants in Gloucester and Green Harbor, most of the fish went into Cape ports, and many were landed at the former Simonitsch Dock in Chatham’s Stage Harbor.
Mark Simonitsch, who manages the dock for its new owners, the Stage Harbor Yacht Club, said the scenes during the bite were reminiscent of the much larger tuna seasons of years past. Simonitsch watched and took photos as brightly lit boats clustered around the dock after dark to meet buyers late into the night.
Then the bonus fishery ended as suddenly as it began after about a week.
“It just shut right off on the 15th,” said Andy Baler of Nantucket Fish Company. “It shut off like a light switch.”
In all, Fitzpatrick said a total of 279 fish were landed between Nov. 7 and Nov. 15 with an average round weight of 732 pounds and an average dressed weight of 585.6 pounds.
Payday
The market for these fish was pretty strong initially, according to Fitzpatrick.
“But it didn’t take long for it to take a dive,” he said.
There were several reasons for that. For one, the big size of the fish was not ideal for the Japanese market. In addition, the Canadian fishery had gone like gangbusters through much of October, channeling a lot of bluefin into key markets in Japan. The Japanese longline fleet also was catching fish of its own during the week-long Chatham fishery.
That left dealers to market much of the bluefin domestically. And that involved its own complications since many potential buyers had already arranged to purchase farmed fish.
Generally speaking, however, fishermen made out OK. Fitzpatrick said the price back to the boat was mostly $7-$8 per pound, with some fish returning closer to $9-$10.
Abundance
There’s no ready explanation for why this year’s tuna bite came so late in the season.
Baler said it could be that the fish are migrating later each year or are usually too far offshore to be noticed. It could be because of a scarcity of their preferred prey, herring and mackerel, he said, perhaps because of pressure from midwater trawlers.
“Or maybe it’s an environmental factor,” he said.
But one thing was certain, Baler said: There are plenty of tuna someplace.
“I guarantee you, they’re out there,” he said.
Fitzpatrick agreed, adding that he has long believed the giants could be found offshore, out of range of most fishermen in this region, rather than fished out.
“This was a significant body of fish,” he said, also pointing out that inshore waters were once again full of juvenile bluefin this year.
“In New England, it’s not a lack of abundance,” he said. “We’ve had plenty, just not of a size we can sell.”
Where from?
Another interesting thing about the November fishery was that it came in a couple of distinct waves.
“The first fish were large, with exceptional shape consistent with eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean fish,” Fitzpatrick said. “Then about three or four days in, the size composition suddenly changed and, while they were still big, they were more western looking, longer.”
University of New Hampshire Large Pelagics Research Center (LPRC) Director Molly Lutcavage couldn’t confirm whether or not there were two bodies of fish.
“But it wouldn’t surprise me, based on the mix of sizes and reports on their condition,” she said.
Tag returns
Lutcavage was disappointed that other commitments prevented her from scrambling graduate students onto Cape boats to sample the fish. However, she and her colleagues were excited by the news that someone had caught a giant adorned with one of their advanced pop-off satellite archival tags.
That someone turned out to be Derek Chandler of Green Harbor, who caught the fish aboard his boat, the Father and Son, near “the Regal Sword” on Nov. 11.
The fish, which was estimated to be 96"-100" long and weighed 682 pounds round weight/521 dressed weight, was originally tagged on Aug. 8, 2008 aboard the Fin Seeker by LPRC researcher Walt Golet on the Northern Edge of Georges. It was estimated to have weighed 600 pounds at the time of tagging.
Around the same time, a tag placed on another fish from the same Northern Edge group began transmitting data right off Hatteras, NC.
“That makes two Northern Edge fish,” Lutcavage said. “It was a stroke of luck that Derek caught the fish and returned the tag to us.”
She added that her team will know a lot more about where the two bluefin traveled over the summer and fall once the tag manufacturer processes and returns the information collected by the tags.
“Based on previous tagging results over the last six or seven years, it looks like giants usually left the region by mid-to-late October, so this might have been an unusual year,” Lutcavage said. “Hopefully, by utilizing tag, catch, and remote sensing data, we can figure out why some fish stayed around so long.”
Whatever the reason was and whatever the future holds for the bluefin fishery, Baler said this year’s surprise tuna bite was welcome.
“It was a needed opportunity for a lot of commercial fishermen to put some money in the bank,” he said.
Lorelei Stevens
Alan Pollock
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