Billion-dollar fish
THEY HAD STARTED paying out the line the previous afternoon, steaming ahead at full speed while sending out mile after mile of 3mm-thick monofilament behind them into the Tasman Sea. Every 11 seconds or so, the crew clipped a snood, a 14m length of nylon, onto the main line. On the end of the snood dangled an arrow squid the size of a human hand, and a 60g lead weight. By the time they were done it was dark and the main line stretched for about 30 nautical miles, invisible beneath the surface of the water. In the far distance, the Southern Alps glowed, a white line above the New Zealand west coast.
It was the first surface longline fishing trip for Michael Smith, the boat’s captain. Universally known as Smithy, he grew up in Greymouth, on the South Island’s West Coast, when there were only a couple of choices for a bloke looking for physical work. You could go down the mines or go to sea. Smithy was 15 when he chose the sea. Since then, he’d tried his hand at inshore trawling, deepwater trawling for orange roughy and hoki, and bottom longlining for ling, hapuku and bluenose. At 44, he wanted a new challenge. Trawling was mechanised, but longlining for tuna was hands-on – a personal fight with each individual fish.
When the crew started hauling the line in again, in the middle of the night, hook after hook had a fat tuna attached. Smithy grinned: they’d struck a school of the big, oily, delicious fish. As the boat approached each tuna, one of the crew unclipped the snood from the main line and transferred it to a fight line. The men’s attention turned to that one animal. Smithy took the fight line in gloved hands, feeling the pull of the fish below battling for freedom.
The line slackened and he knew the fish was winding up its strength. “Oh, he’s going to run!” Smithy yelled. Then twaaang, the line shot away from him, his hands burning as it slid through his grip. He let it slide. He needed to play the fish, let it run for a bit, then let it know who was boss. You couldn’t just chuck it in a hauler and bring it up using the brute force of a hydraulic lift – that would rip the hook out of its mouth.
Smithy fought the hefty bluefin to the side of the boat and the three other crew helped to hoist its glistening gunmetal body onto the deck. It weighed perhaps 150kg. One of the men shoved a stainless-steel spike into a dimple on its head, killing it instantly, then slipped the deck hose into its hot insides for 15 minutes to flush out the blood. Smithy went back to the wheel, gunned the engine, and moved the boat on to the next hook.
Soon, there were eight or 10 massive fish on the deck, blood trailing behind the boat, sharks circling. Smithy was surrounded by life and death. Wow, he thought, this is a frickin’ blast. It was 8am by the time they’d hauled in the final fish. Smithy had just worked 18 hours straight – but that was the nature of fishing. You worked until the job was done. It was hard but it came with such an adrenaline rush. I dunno if I’ll ever grow out of this, Smithy thought.
TUNA ARE SOME of the largest, fastest, most finely tuned fish in the sea – schooling, torpedo-shaped, migratory hunters. Humans have hunted them in turn for thousands of years. We stamped their image onto coins in ancient times, and incorporated them into music and art from the Mediterranean Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
Today, tuna are among the world’s most lucrative fish, netting US$40.8 billion globally in 2018, according to a report by US-based policy research group the Pew Charitable Trusts. Tuna fisheries employ people in more than 70 countries, and sustain the economies of multiple Pacific Island nations. But soaring demand for tuna during the past 50 years has decimated global populations of the fish. Forced labour and abusive working conditions
