“DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS… – They sit around the gleaming spacious galleys in the evenings, talking a mixture of English and Portuguese, singing songs, drinking red wine and arguing over the best places to fish. The older ones tell the young ones how much easier life for a fisherman is aboard the sleek, swift and comfortable new tunaboats than it was aboard the creaky old boats of another time. These men claim to be the best net fishermen in the world, and their successes in the tuna fishing industry seem to bear them out. They are fiercely proud of their Portuguese ancestry, their individualism, and their right to roam the world’s oceans to fish wherever they want.
BACKBONE OF THE FLEET
There are usually 16 or 17 of them to a tunaboat but not all are Portuguese. Some are of Spanish ancestry, some Italians, a few Greeks, some Slovenians. But those with ancestral roots in the Azores, the Madeiras, Portugal itself, are the most numerous in the U.S. tuna fishing fleet. Most of them live in San Diego regardless of what name is painted on the stern of the tunaboat as the home port. They take their boats to the Marquesas, Africa, the Central Pacific, to the coasts of Peru and Ecuador, sometimes to the Eastern seaboard. The Japanese, Spanish, Mexicans, Dutch, and English have hired them as Captains to learn successful tuna purse seining. These are the men who are the backbone of the 130-boat U.S. tuna fleet; the men who scoop the yellowfin, skipjack, big eye and bluefin tuna from the sea.
NETS WOVEN IN HISTORY
‘I guess it’s something in our blood,” said one old-time tunaboat captain ‘The Portuguese have been fishing for tuna with nets for hundreds of years.’ Some of them, the more successful, make good money – $30,000 a year for experienced fishermen and upwards of $50,000 for Captains and Engineers – if the weather is good and the fish are there to be caught (*Editorial Note: The Average annual wage for a full-time working man in San Diego at this time [1973] was approximately $11,500 – ed. – 1973 Source: U.S. Department of Commerce). Today they sail on complex $3,500,000 tunaboats that are, for the most part, built either in San Diego or Tacoma, Washington. CAMPBELL INDUSTRIES and its subsidiary, (cont. Next Pg.) SAN DIEGO MARINE CONSTRUCTION, is the biggestproducer of super-seiners in the free world. A modern tunaboat has to have space to store more than *1,100 tons* of frozen tuna in fish wells. That means there is space on the upper decks for comfortable cabins and spacious staterooms. They have carpeted floors, roomy kitchen-dining areas, modern showers, even tiny altars for the mostly Catholic seamen. On some of them the captain’s quarters have a living room, a bar, leather couches, color television. ‘We have a cocktail hour before dinner unless we’re fishing,” said one tunaboat captain. We’re out for 80 or 90 days at a time and I figure I owe this crew the best I can offer.’ The tunaboats are equipped with a vast array of electronic and scientific devices, including machines that receive and print daily weather maps of the Eastern Pacific. Many of the fishermen – the young as well as the older – are not too impressed with some of the new instruments, but they are willing to give all of them a try. For the most part, they rely instead on their inherited traits that have made them successful. Some claim they can smell the tuna, but most rely on groups of birds, porpoise, logs and their past experience to signal that it is time to start fishing.
Two tunaboats, the ‘VOYAGER’ and the ‘MARGARET L.’, carry helicopters for spotting fish, but the men of the tuna fleet can’t agree on whether the choppers have really helped. They do accept the scientific findings and developments by some researchers, primarily those of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Southwest Center at La Jolla, on water temperature, weather, currents and porpoise-saving recommendations. Although porpoise are often an indicator of tuna schools, there is only one species of tuna, yellowfin, that travels with the animals. Most of the yellowfin tuna fishing is in a regulatory area that is open only 10 or 12 weeks of the year. The rest of the time the fishermen go there for skipjack and bluefin tuna that do not associate with porpoise.
Logs are a favorite indicator that there are fish around since tuna like to congregate around them. Fishermen will follow the logs for long periods of time, setting their nets around them whenever there has been time enough to gather a new school. Some tunaboat skippers have even strapped battery- operated RADIO TRANSMITTERS that send out bleeper signals onto the logs so they can home in on them from time to time and locate them.
Setting the three-quarter mile long 750’ deep tuna nets is no small task, but gathering it back in is an even more complicated and dangerous operation. Today’s nylon nets cost nearly $100,000, depending on the size and the shape. Repairing the nets damaged by tuna, machinery, porpoise, rocks, sharks, whales and even currents, is a never-ending job. When the tunaboats return to San Diego in November and December, the net mending goes on daily at the Broadway Pier and along the Embarcadero, much to the delight not only of tourists, but San Diego’s own devoted waterfront watchers. When leaving on one of the lengthy trips, the modern super-seiner may carry 200,000 gallons of fuel, its net stacked high on the stern with a wide, powerful skiff atop the pile. The tunaboat will cruise at about 17 knots (nearly 20 miles an hour – ed.), usually heading south or southwest from San Diego.
Purse Seining Operation
The Gulf of Tehuantepec, off the coasts of Mexico and Guatemala, is a favorite destination in the spring – and also one of the worst areas for high winds and storms called ‘chubascos’. Tehuantepec is the windy graveyard for a number of fishing boats and fishermen. A tunaboat is virtually always ready to set its net. One end of the long black net is kept attached to the front of the skiff, ready for action. At a signal from the mastman, usually the Captain of the boat who is more than 60’ above deck in a crows nest, the skiff is released and goes crashing into the water. The net peels off as the tunaboat starts a long circular sweep to the left. When the net is all out, the pursing operation begins. Along the bottom of the net is a steel cable with both ends attached to huge drum winches aboard the tunaboat. While the skiff and the tunaboat hold the surface ends of the net close together, that cable is drawn in, closing the bottom of the net so it forms a huge cup beneath the surface. It works like the drawstring on a purse, hence the name given this type of fishing – purse seining.
DANGEROUS AND CHILLY
After the bottom is closed, the entire net is pulled in, hopefully with a “full bag” of tuna but sometimes with nothing but water. The catch can range from practically nothing to more than 200 tons – although the latter is infrequent: As the net is retrieved the dangers to the fishermen increase. A 60-lb. tuna caught in the net can drop onto the crewmen as they are stacking the net. They get drenched during that operation and it’s often a chilly experience. There is a constant danger of injury around the heavy cables and whirring equipment used to bring in the net.
A smaller net, called a brailer, is used to lift the tuna from the big net’s pocket onto the deck of the tunaboat. The brailer drops the fish down a hatch to a series of stainless steel troughs which convey the fish into the freezing fish wells where they are kept frozen solid until unloaded. There is no cleaning or gilling of tuna done aboard U.S. tunaboats.
When fishing for yellowfin, porpoise are sometimes caught and a series of techniques have been developed, along with new equipment, to free the air-breathing animals before they get entangled in the net and drown. Speedboats (called ‘pongas’ by the Portuguese) actually herd those porpoise and the accompanying schools of tuna, into a circle until the nets set around them. A process called ‘backing down’ (which lowers one end of the net and allows the porpoise to jump free) is the most effective means of releasing the animals, but other systems are being developed.”
(*Source: San Diego UNION newspaper – Sunday, December 9, 1973 – Pgs. 120-121, Section G)