Millions of dollars at stake in bluefin tuna battle

By Connie Sage, correspondent

When Shawn Shiner heard that bluefin tuna were being caught off Cape Hatteras, he took a day off work and headed to the Outer Banks in hopes of hooking a big one.

He wasn't disappointed.

The Suffolk pharmaceutical salesman landed an 84-inch, 318-pound giant bluefin on March 25 from the Matador, a Virginia Beach-based charter fishing boat.

There have been thousands of bluefin off the coast of northeast North Carolina since mid-February.

But unless quotas are enforced to prevent overfishing in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, at some point there may not be many left to catch, local fishermen and government officials say.

"Something absolutely has to be done," said Capt. Jake Hiles of the Matador. "The U.S. stands the most to lose. We're the ones playing by the rules; nobody else is."

Bluefin are prized by sports anglers for their size and by commercial watermen who sell the highly sought-after meat for sushi in Japan and in upscale domestic markets such as New York and Chicago.

Asian sushi buyers have paid up to six figures for giant bluefins. A 300-pounder like the one caught by Shiner might have brought in $4,000 to $8,000 during the commercial bluefin season, Hiles said.

"This time of year, there's not a lot of other species to catch," said Olan West, captain of the West Wind out of Oregon Inlet Fishing Center.

"It affects everything down here - the motels, restaurants, all the little stores," he said.

While there's no break down for bluefin tuna, overall fishing is big business on the Outer Banks. Passenger fees for all charter boats were $55.7 million in coastal North Carolina, according to a 2009 report by the state's Marine Fisheries division and administered by North Carolina Sea Grant. More than $30.2 million was from Dare County alone, said John Bone, head of the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce.

Money spent for lodging and food for all of coastal North Carolina was about $380 million, Bone said.

By some estimates, bluefin tuna stocks off the coast of Europe and Africa shrank 60 percent between 1997 and 2007.

A proposal that would have banned international trade in bluefin tuna was defeated March 18 at a United Nations conference in Doha, Qatar.

Sue Lieberman headed a delegation from the Pew Environmental Group in Washington to the conference last month in hopes of banning the international bluefin trade.

With the amendment defeated, she and others now are working to protect bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Mexico, which, she said, would preserve breeding stocks and prevent them from becoming an endangered species.

Many countries are catching double the quotas set by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas with no repercussions, said Rom Whitaker, captain of the Release, a charter fishing boat on Hatteras Island.

The United States has "bent over backward and have abided by the quota to preserve and protect the bluefin tuna," said Whitaker, a member of the National Marine Fisheries Service's Highly Migratory Species Advisory panel.

Bluefin tuna are caught along the Eastern seaboard commercially and recreationally. Both are tightly regulated.

Sport and charter boat anglers can catch one bluefin per day, per boat; the rest have to be released. The survival rate for those tossed back is as high as 95 percent, said Dan Rooks, owner of the Tuna Duck sport fishing boat in Hatteras.

"We do things to help protect the fish," he said, including fishing with a circle hook that catches only the corner of a fish's mouth, and using a pole with a loop to release the fish with a minimum of handling.

Despite claims of crashing bluefin populations, local recreational anglers have felt plenty tugging on their lines.

Bob Robinson, captain of the Fin Seeker charter boat from Virginia Beach, said this is the most bluefin tuna he's seen off of Hatteras in a decade.

"There are acres and acres of them," he said. "It's just phenomenal."

Steve Hissey of Teach's Lair Marina i n Hatteras said it's "probably twice the season we had last year, with a bigger class of fish averaging over 100 pounds apiece."

The recreational season is open year-round, but the most tuna are in local waters from about mid-February to March.

For commercial catches, the season ended nationally Jan. 31 and reopens June 1.

The bluefin often aren't in local waters by the time the season closes, and they're gone when it reopens.

"I don't know why the U.S. keeps hammering its fishermen the way it does," said Tilman Gray, owner of Avon Seafood on Hatteras Island. The season should be extended, he said, to allow the quota to be caught.

Gray said some years he has sold, through brokers, as many as 50 bluefin tuna at $5 to $30 a pound, depending on the quality of the fish.

For the past couple of years, he hasn't sold any bluefin because the fish stayed around Morehead City, N.C.

"By the time they got up here, the season was over," Gray said.