SKIPPER's BLOG: What a Waste UPDATED

I don’t know if I’ll ever live long to understand how God-awfully wasteful, ridiculous and foolish we can be sometimes.

A fishermen on Newfoundland’s northeast coast got a tuna caught in one of his herring nets this week — a big one.

One big tuna can regularly fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars on the market in Japan where it is a prized fish for sushi lovers and chefs. It’s like a winning lottery ticket for a fisherman.

Actually in this case it was like a winning lottery ticket, but one that got eaten by the dog.

See, Ivan Regular, the fisherman that ended up accidentally getting the tuna, didn’t have a licence for tuna (and why the hell would he? He was fishing herring). And furthermore the season was closed.

That’s all perfectly understandable.

But Holy Mary Mother of CHRIST, surely there must have been something more constructive we could have done with a half-million-dollar fish than just DUMPING IT LIKE TRASH.

That’s what DFO ordered Regular to do — get rid of it. Dump it overboard. Discard it.

Absolutely mental.

The rules are rules for a good reason, but this is a case where there needs to be some form of wiggle room where the authorities and fishermen can come up with a better plan than dumping fish overboard.

It was sheer coincidence that resulted in Ivan regular getting a tuna, and there should have been some way to deal with the issue better than the one that was carried out. In this day in age it is criminal that such wastefulness would even be considered, never mind directly ordered.

If you’ve got the patience, you can link to CBC the story HERE... Because if I have to read it again, I’m afraid I might curse up a blue streak the likes of which would smoke out the entirety of the internet.

UPDATE

After yesterday’s bog lost a friend of mine in the know about tuna gave me a call to let me in on a few things that required me to update the rant, or at least the part about the potentnial value of the fish in question.

Seems calling the tuna that Ivan regular snared a “half million dollar fish” was a tad off. And by a tad, I mean a LOT.

A quick check of the numbers for Newfoundland and Labrador this year shows that we had 64 tuna landed in the commercial fishery in this province in 2012, and those 64 fish were worth about $265,000 COMBINED. That’s for the whole lot.

So yeah, one fish worth twice what the entire sum whole for the 64 fish — not to mention that the fish hadn’t been caught by hook and properly iced down as per the regular tuna fishery — caught in NL this year was probably juuuuuuuuussssssttt a bit exaggerated.

Nevertheless, I remain indignant and stubborn that it was absolutely a bloody waste to dump the thing, unless it was rancid and crawling with rot and insects or something. There has to be better ways to deal with things like that.