When one thinks of bluefin tuna fishing hotspots in the north Atlantic, the south coast of Newfoundland is probably not the first place that comes to mind.
But over the last few years a brief, but lucrative tuna fishery is taking place in the area of the St. Pierre Banks and Burin-based fisherman Winston Pitcher is one of the Newfoundland harvesters involved.
Pitcher, who has been catching the large, sought after fish for about six years, explained the south coast fishery is a competitive fishery, with each boat receiving a number of tags.
“There are three sets of licences. There is a part-time, half-time Newfoundland fleet which gets tags (five per boat) every year — that is my fleet. And there is rotational list, where they get tags every three years and there are a few licences that allow for eight tuna, but there are only two or three of those licences.”
Pitcher said his crew on the 55-foot Burin Tradition had no problem in getting their 2015 bluefin quota.
“We filled our five tags in about three hours. There was a big crowd of boats out that day and almost everyone got their fish that morning. The season opened up that morning and the next day there were 25 tuna at the St. Lawrence plant waiting to get offloaded.”
The Newfoundland harvester said that each year there seems to be more and more tuna in the region and speculated it might have something to do with population growth and a possible increase in water temperature. “The water temperature for our trip was about 14.75 degrees Celsius and there were lots of fish around. But they did disappear a few weeks after that when the water got colder.”
While the bluefin tuna fishery is quite quick and usually over in one trip, Pitcher explained it is not quite as lucrative as some tuna-related television shows might make it out to be, with N.L. harvesters receiving an average of $6/pound for their catches.
He added that his final 2015 catch weighed in, once the head and gut were removed, at about 3,100 pounds.
To his knowledge, almost all of the tuna landed at the OCI plant in St. Lawrence were prepared and shipped to the Japanese market.
However, Newfoundland is not the only North Atlantic location seeing an apparent increase in the valued bluefin tuna. The fish are now showing up in the northern waters off the coast of Greenland.
In summer, fishermen in east Greenland are now catching mackerel and Atlantic bluefin tuna that have migrated far from their spawning grounds in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico — due, in part, to warming water temperatures. Satellite images show the Arctic territory’s vast ice sheet, which holds between six and seven per cent of the world’s fresh water and covers four-fifths of its land, shrinking by nearly 50 cubic miles (208 cubic kilometres) per year. The ice sheet, a potentially massive contributor to a rise in sea levels, lost mass twice as fast between 2003 and 2010 as during the entire 20th century, researchers reported recently in the journal Nature.
