November 7, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — Fishermen up and down the New England coast say it has been decades since they’ve been able to catch so many Atlantic bluefin tuna, so fast. Once severely depleted, populations of the prized sushi fish appear to be rebuilding.
Now the industry and some scientists say the international commission that regulates the fish can allow a much bigger catch. But some environmental groups disagree.
Peter Speeches is a commercial fisherman who sails his 45-foot boat, the Erin & Sarah, out of a Portland marina. His rods and reels are racked, though, and the boat has been docked the past several weeks. That’s because tuna fishermen reached their fall catch quotas earlier than ever this year.
“There was more fish here than I’ve seen in 30 years, and I fish virtually every single day. This year we caught probably the same amount, but in half the time,” he says.
This year, Speeches says, the thousand-plus boats that fish bluefin off New England were blessed by day after day of good boating weather. Forage fish such as herring and pogies showed up in numbers — and they swam relatively near to shore, bringing the big tuna in to feast, where smaller boats could get at them pretty easily.
Above all, he says, there were just a whole lot of bluefin around, and biting.
“They were everywhere. When they hit this year in July, they hit from the Canadian border to New Jersey, and they were thick. And they got caught fast,” Speeches says.