Just to show why the Blue fin Tuna industry will never stop fishing this magnificent creature to extinction!

BBC News - Tuna hits highest price in nine years at Tokyo auction

For those of you who haven't seen or heard of it you should watch the Documentary "The end of the line" it will really be an eye opener for you!

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Tomo

www.unchartedwatersthefilm.com or email jatstanic@aol.com for your copy

This is going to get worse as increasing over fishing and therefore scarcity will force prices higher and higher until we reach the point that they are no longer financially viable to fish for and that might be too late to save the species. Even if a ban were to be introduced the Japanese would find a way round it if their reaction to whaling bans is anything to go by.

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“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

Another great succcess for the free market! There should be some kind of mechanism for forcing a moratorium on countries which are unwilling to manage their fisheries responsibly.

It is not the Japs... they are just eager buyers of angler caught bluefin off the eastern US coast. So lucrative is the business that luxury sports fishing boats (they all have tall 'tuna towers' over there) employ spotter planes, to fly up and down the Gulf Stream edge, radioing the exact location of a bluefin pod to their sportsfishers.
GPS has a lot to answer for.
The catch then airfreighted often by charter jet to maximize value.

British stocks, called 'Tunny' Thunnys thunnus, now long extinct in our North Sea, where they were commonly caught by wealthy anglers off Scarborough and Whitby about 80 years ago.

From: BBC News - Tuna hits highest price in nine years at Tokyo auction

"A tuna has been sold at auction in Tokyo's fish market for 16.28 million yen ($175,000, £109,000), the highest price paid in Japan for nine years.

NOTE: 'Cultivated/farmed fish'.
Last year a similar fish made less than 10 million yen.

Bluefin tuna is known as the king of sushi and the Japanese eat more of it than any other nation, according to the BBC's correspondent in Tokyo, Roland Buerk.

Conservationists are calling for a moratorium on fishing to save the bluefin tuna from extinction in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. "


The BBC report, and earlier posts, are disingenuous. The 'Northern Bluefin Tuna' is not native to the Pacific Ocean Northern bluefin tuna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia but are heavily cultivated off the Japanese coast.

The EU supported the tuna fleet with grants totalling 35million euros between 2000 and 2008. Spain, a well known stickler for adhering to fishery regulations got more than half of the cash to expand it's capacity.
The old dodo hunting mentality's alive and well.

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Musha rig um du rum da

Actually giant blue fin are not extinct in these islands as they turn up off the West coast of Ireland in the autumn in most years, here's the current record caught only a little way out in Donegal Bay in 2001, it was 440kg which I think it is 968lbs. Until recently it was the largest fish taken on rod and line but it was beaten by a 1,056lb six gilled shark in June 2009, the same boat had released a much bigger fish earlier in the year.



You are right about the US sport fishermen but at least they have the option for C&R without doing too much damage. Having said that the value of a fish on the quay is going to tempt more than a few.

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“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

We used to holiday at Conil de la Frontera, just south of Cadiz, and there is an annual tuna festival to mark the start of the season where the boats sail down the coast from Puerto de Conil to Zahara de los Atunes (Zahara of the tuna). The main Spanish tuna fleet fishes for smaller species in the Bay of Biscay and out into the Western Approaches of the UK & Ireland rather than the giant bluefin.

They still fish for the bluefin fairly close inshore here which is of course on the Atlantic Coast but bluefin are much harder to find in the Mediterranean and the traditional Italian "metanza" that has been held for centuries, where boats encircled shoals and then gaffed the fish into the boats from the shrinking net circles, has probably disappeared through lack of fish.

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“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

Not much bigger than Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry's Whitby, Yorkshire, Great British and then World record of 851 lb. Account and photographs in this interesting article:
Fileybay.com looks at big game Tunny fishing off the Yorkshire Coast.



I mentioned extinct in the North Sea - not due to angling pressure, but to careless overfishing of their food, herring shoals then numerous, their numbers never really recovered.

I've got a little video footage of tunny fishing out of Scarborough/Whitby in the 1930s and you have to admire their skill and tenacity in using what we would consider primitive gear (although it was purpose designed) fishing from small cobles as the herring boats pulled their nets.

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“There is no more lovely country than Monmouthshire in early spring. Nowhere do the larks sing quite so passionately, as if somehow inspired by the Welsh themselves. There is a blackbird on every thorn and a cock chaffinch, a twink as they call him there, on every bush...... It moved me profoundly. I had been spared to see another spring, and I thank God for it.”

Oliver Kite
“A Spring Day on the Usk”
A Fisherman’s Diary

From guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 June 2009 07.00 BST. Slightly higher subsidy estimates from the Graun but it does look like the Spanish fleet is being paid very well to fish badly -


€4.4bn EU subsidies have boosted overfishing, figures show

Spain benefits most from fisheries payments which Brussels admits have been a failure.



Spain has raked in more than €2.7bn (£2.29bn) in EU subsidies for its fishing industry over 12 years as part of a spending policy that Brussels admits has been a failure, according to data revealed today.

The figures suggest tens of millions have been spent subsidising vessels and practices exacerbating illegal fishing, increasing EU fleet over-capacity, and compounding overfishing in European waters.

Out of 27 countries in the EU, Spain got 48% of the subsidies dispensed, while the percentages for the other big fishing powers – France, Britain and Denmark – are only in single figures.

Two NGOs, the Pew Environment Group and EU Transparency, spent almost two years trying to obtain figures for the EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) subsidies. A website – fishsubsidy.org – launched by them today analyses data obtained from the European Commission and member governments. Of €4.4bn in EU handouts to the fishing industry in 1994-2006, Spain got more than €2.7bn and Britain, where the Scottish fleets make up around 70% of the industry, was given €225m – a 12th of the Spanish total.

In the current EU budget period of 2007-13, Brussels is doling out a similar level of subsidies, €4.3bn – or €837m a year.

The figures show some of the biggest cash windfalls went to ships and firms notorious for their questionable operations. A huge Spanish trawler named by Greenpeace as the most egregious offender against vulnerable stocks of Mediterranean blue fin tuna enjoyed EU subsidies of more than €4m, and more from the Spanish government. Three vessels blacklisted by Greenpeace were given handouts believed to run into millions.

The CFP falls under the authority of Brussels and the commission, not national governments. The EU fisheries commissioner, Joe Borg, this year admitted the policy was a failure.

"The large majority of subsidies are spent on vessels fishing stock that are already overfished," said Marcus Knigge of Pew. The researchers found the subsidies policy was making over-capacity worse. In Spain, most of the funding went to building new boats, while in the other countries the bulk went towards scrapping vessels. At least seven vessels notionally scrapped under subsidy received further payments. The data indicates the names of the vessels, but not the actual beneficiaries of the payments, the owners and firms, since the official suppliers of the information refused to disclose that information.

"Vessels themselves are not the recipients of EU funds. It is the owner of the vessel who receives the funds," the researchers noted. "Record-keeping by members states is not good enough," said Jack Thurston of EU Transparency.

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Musha rig um du rum da