OK, so this week’s tuna fishing expedition wasn’t nearly the Freddy Kreuger-style bloodbath I feared. In fact, it was kinda glorious. Turns out that the Wilderness and I are best buds if it improves the quality of my grub… and tuna “loins”* are about as improving as grub gets.
The Resident Carpenter and I set out for Depoe Bay, Oregon on Monday night, arriving at our tumbledown (to put it charitably) motor inn and hitting the sack early. We had to be at the boat by 5:30.
That’s 5:30 AM. In the morning. Really early. It’s still dark out and everything.
Not my world, folks.
Naturally, Nathan was up, all packed for tuna, and bouncing around impatiently outside my door, waiting for me to drag my head off the pillow. We donned tuna fishing gear–something called FroggToggs, i.e., rubberized pants and jackets that looked like poorly conceived, oversized Tyvek envelopes but were amazingly cheap and slipped over our clothes. We struggled into heavy black rubber boots; if I really did slip in the blood and fall overboard as Mom predicted, the sharks would choke on my boots first and decide I was too tough to unwrap.
That was the plan, anyway.
Our look was less fashion-forward and more Michelin-Man-Ate-the-Pillsbury-DoughBoy, but we didn’t care. Warned about decks awash with stinky, never-get-it-out tuna blood, we armored up, headed to the pitch-dark dock and clambered aboard.
Here’s how tuna fishing works: The captain gathers his crew, invites a dozen hungry tuna lovers onboard before they’re half-awake, and chugs to the fishing grounds through the foggy, glorious sunrise.
Three hours later, we toss out lures attached to heavy trolling poles, while the captain revvs the engines and takes off, dragging the lures behind at a fast clip.
This is the tunafish equivalent of ringing the dinner bell. Alerted, the tuna flash up from the depths, far down as 1,100-1,200 feet, peer nearsightedly at the artificial lures and decide they’re mackerel. They take big, juicy bites…of plastic.
Clearly, tuna are pretty stupid.
The Resident Carpenter and Forrest-the-crew, landing Nathan’s first tuna. I would show you a picture of landing MY first tuna, but I was too busy landing it.
Forrest and the captain’s son, about to kill and bleed the tuna. Apparently if you don’t do this the tuna meat is all clotty or something.
We waiting fisherpersons don’t need to be much smarter. Our job is to carefully watch the trolling poles, awaiting a bobble of that crucial pole-tip or the flash of an iridescent tuna leaping as it bites the lure.
We scream, “FISH ON!!!” (hysterically, with much repetition)
The captain stops the boat. We grab the brrrrzipping fishing pole(s) as they head overboard, and start reeling in hapless tuna.
The rest of us reel in the empty trolling poles and break out the “handpoles,” lighter rods intended to increase the fun of fighting the fish. We cast and reel and drop and jerk poles like mad, trying to catch a fish.
Meanwhile, the crew “chums” the water with dead herring, keeping the tuna too excited to notice the hooks. We customers pull in fish after fish.
That’s the plan, anyway. In practice, the handpoles didn’t achieve much, probably because they used fake fish instead of real bait. Not even a tuna is dumb enough to chase plastic when there’s a genuine edible herring a few feet away.
At some point, the tuna become bored (or full), abandon their captured mates and head back down the briny depths. Things get quiet.
The captain restarts the engines and we do it all in reverse: Reel IN the handpoles, reel OUT the trolling poles as we head to the next sonar tuna sighting.
So, like most fishing expeditions, tuna fishing becomes six hours of rather boring pole-watching occasionally punctuated by short, exciting intervals of furious fishcatching.
For the record, reeling an annoyed fish straight UP maybe 500 feet while it’s equally determined to head straight DOWN takes a helluva a lot of cranking and reasonably good muscles.
Caught tuna are humanely killed (i.e., gaffed and bashed over the head) and allowed to bleed out on the deck, which keeps the meat usable. They’re packed into giant coolers filled with ice and seawater.
And yep, the “awash with blood” warnings were dead on. Tuna blood flooded the deck, spattering our arms, legs and just about everything else.
If that sounds like a page from Le Grand-Guignol, well…it was.
And yet, to borrow from Michael Pollan, we’d eliminated those prissy, conscience-sanitizing food-chain middlemen to gain a first-hand glimpse of where our tuna casseroles come from. What better way to experience food gathering firsthand, than to jam a Phillips screwdriver into a fat fish cortex and get the deck (and yourself) all bloody?
Once caught, killed, and bled, the still-bloody tuna are buried in a binful of seawater-laced ice.
Would it have been much simpler (and cheaper) to grab a packet of tuna off the grocery store shelf, or pick up a premium block of toro from Uwajimaya? Of course, but that wasn’t the point.
Morally, if you’re gonna be eating a living critter, it seems only fair that you understand exactly how it got to your table. If you can’t live with it, then I guess you become a vegetarian.
I am not vegetarian. Despite my angst (and, let’s face it, crushing guilt that I offed a perfectly happy fish, probably a philanthropic pillar of the tuna community complete with wife and kids) it is strangely beautiful and calming to be riding the sea, catching your dinner. The weather was absolutely perfect, the sea was glassy-smooth, and we met up with schools of moon jellies, mackerel playing in the swells, and assorted kelp, sea critters, and birds.
I learned a lot. I saw my first blue shark (well, my first when I was ON the water, not IN the water with the shark). I learned that once the sharks come in, tunafisherpeople go elsewhere. Sharks make short work of whatever fish are being reeled in, and they eat all the chum.
We weren’t about to argue with sharks, which tells you who’s really the apex predator , right?
BTW, 73 pounds may be the average size of an albacore tuna, but off Depoe Bay you’re more likely to find 25-30 pound tuna, so we kissed goodbye to the notion of hauling home hundreds of pounds of fresh fish. Besides, having now reeled in a 24-pound tuna–and nearly collapsing from exhaustion in the process–I can’t imagine how I’d catch a 73-pounder.
And I can’t really say I “caught” tuna on this trip, not without blushing. When my dad and I fished, we learned the best fishing holes, developed strategies, just basically did all the work of catching our dinner. I was expected to get that bait on the hook, learn to cast and do my damnedest to outwit a fish with a brain the size of a pea. Once caught, it was up to me to get it into the boat, get the hook out, then humanely turn it into food.
Do NOT expect to do this on a tuna charter.
The tuna boat captain needs his customers to (a) have a good time and (b) exit the boat with as much tuna meat as possible. He achieves these goals by doing all the work; he can’t depend on fumbling amateurs to actually hook a tuna. His continued livelihood depends on me happily collapsing under the weight of all that sushi.
How fumbling were the amateurs we sailed with? Let’s just say that, for once, I was far from the worst in the group. The Resident Carpenter, naturally, was the exact opposite of a fumbling amateur; he quickly earned the respect of the crew and could probably earn a fair living as a professional tuna guy. I’ve yet to find something Nathan ISN’T good at.)
Either the boat caught the fish on the trolling poles, or the crew hooked them with live bait on the hand poles; both were then turned over to the paying customers to “catch,” i.e., get them up to the boat. Then the gaffer (not the glassblowing kind but the kind that holds the fishyhookypoley thing) grabbed the fish by the gills, brought it onboard, and the executioner did the jabby-stabby screwdriver thing to bleed out the fish and toss it on the ice.
As fishing went, it felt like cheating. Stabbing fish in a barrel. For all the actual “fishing” we did, we might as well have gone down to the docks and ordered a few tuna, then gone for a sail.
Nathan, OTOH, has spent much of his life creating his own food by hunting, fishing, farming, woods-gathering, and animal husbandrying. My angst over “real” fishing merely rated his eye-roll. In his world, when you’re hungry and delicious food shows up, you grab it. You worry about morality when you have enough money to visit the grocery store.
OK, morality be damned. We caught 22 tuna, and I eagerly lined up for my share.
The nice thing about charter fishing is that it doesn’t matter WHO caught what, the catch will be evenly divided among paying customers. Each of us wound up with about 1.75 tuna. That meant the RC and I took home 14 tuna tenderloins, roughly 50 pounds of delicious fishmeat suitable for sushi-making, searing, or just smoking and grilling.
Or maybe canning. We haven’t decided.
When you bring your tuna catch ashore, kind folk are waiting to turn it into tenderloins. Cost is about $5 per fish to clean, another $10 or so to vacuum-pack it.
The nice folk on the shore smiled and cleaned and trimmed our fish, then vacuum-packed and flash-froze it. I was delighted; the RC was slightly less delighted. “50 pounds. Not exactly your 438 pounds of fish,” he grumbled.
“Oh well,” I said lightly, “That’s still plenty for sharing. Let’s take a loin to our neighbor, Kim!”
And THAT, friends, is how you turn a Resident Carpenter into an angry wolf: Suggest giving away his tuna.
“Do what ever you want with YOUR share…” he growled.
I want to keep all ten of my digits, so this blogpost is likely the closest you’re going to get to our tuna. The RC doesn’t growl often, but when he does, he means it.
The tuna stays in the freezer. Nathan took the “waste” home, too, which makes excellent bait for our real fishing expeditions.
Time to break out the BBQ grill…
*OK, they CALL them tuna loins, or tenderloins, but they’re really thick, meaty filets from either side of the fish. They closely resemble beef tenderloin before it’s cut into filet mignon, though, hence the name. If you’ve ever had great seared tuna, or toro/maguro sashimi, you’ll know it tastes a lot like that, too.
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