tuna on kayak

[Ken Gargett]

article from the nyt. thought it might be of interest. how much fun would it be!!

but as we have a heap of sharks around at the moment, including some 4 metre great whites, not just right now.

Catching Tuna and Hanging On for the Ride Julia Cumes for The New York TimesDave Lamoureux fishes for bluefin tuna from his kayak in Massachusetts.

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Dave Lamoureux with the 157-pound bluefin, a record tuna for an unassisted kayak fisherman.

Apparently, it never occurred to the authorities that someone might be crazy enough to want to catch a bluefin while sitting in what amounts to a floating plastic chair and enjoying what Melville called a “Nantucket sleigh ride.”

Since the end of July, Lamoureux has caught three bluefins this way, paddling a couple of miles off Race Point, at the tip of Provincetown, hooking a tuna and holding on, the rod clipped to a harness on his chest, while being towed at speeds up to 15 miles an hour before the fish exhausts itself.

His most recent catch, on Nov. 5, was <A title="YouTube video." href="

a 157-pound bluefin, a record tuna for an unassisted kayak fisherman, and a near record over all, topped only by a 183-pound halibut caught by Howard McKim, an Alaskan, in 2004. Reeling in a halibut, though, has been likened to hauling in a load of plywood, and some of Lamoureux’s admirers consider landing a bluefin, known for its power and ferocity, the greater feat. He is a hero at bait shops up and down Cape Cod. On fishing blogs, a few grumblers call him a dangerous idiot.

Until about 10 years ago most kayak fishermen knew each other by name. Lately the sport has enjoyed a growth spurt, but it is still not recognized by the International Game Fish Association, the official record keeper for saltwater anglers. So kayakers keep their records informally and on Internet forums. There is an honor system. Some kayakers allow themselves to be towed out and back by a mother ship.

Lamoureux’s record required paddling alone and bringing the fish into shore.

Lamoureux is 42 and friendly, with a big smile and a ready laugh, and lives most of the year in Chicago, where he is a futures and options trader. He also has a place in Boston and access to his parents’ summer home here.

“My personality — I trend toward risk and danger,” he said last week, explaining that he used to rock climb and do extreme skiing.

But kayak fishing entailed “measured risk, not being-crazy risk,” he added, and compared it to trading. “Being a trader, you like risk. You’re comfortable with it. You have to weigh the reward versus the other side, which in this case is your life.”

Lamoureux’s 12-foot Heritage FeatherLite isn’t even a fishing kayak.

It’s a recreational kayak he found in the family garage and modified with additional equipment, the exact nature of which he will not disclose.

“I can’t be revealing all my secrets,” he said, “or else guys who are younger and in better shape will be breaking my records.”

When Lamoureux climbs into his kayak, wearing a wet suit or a dry suit, he is loaded down with safety gear: life jacket, whistles, strobe lights, a signaling mirror, a compass, two GPS devices, two radios, two cellphones, and two knives, in case he is dragged too far out to sea and needs to slash the line.

He hasn’t yet capsized, but Lamoureux still prepares himself psychologically to wind up in the drink.

“I actually consider myself safer than the average boater because all the safety equipment is attached to my person,” he said. He also carries dive fins in case he has to swim home. “I don’t plan on calling the Coast Guard or the commercial fishermen for help,” he said. “I think that’s irresponsible.”

When Lamoureux first showed up in their fishing grounds, commercial tuna fishermen figured he was lost or in distress. Now he has befriended several of them, and he will turn over a fish too big for him to manage. In August he reluctantly did this with a bluefin that eventually escaped but that on the fishing boat’s sonar looked to be about 800 pounds.

“That just broke my spirit,” he said. “They told me, ‘That fish is so big, it doesn’t even know you’re here.’ ”

Two years ago, Lamoureux began kayaking for stripers and bluefish. This summer he started looping through the tuna grounds on his way home, and at the end of July he hooked a bluefin. It proved too big for his striper rig and broke his line, but made him think catching a really big fish was at least possible.

Lamoureux consulted with George Lewis, a longtime mentor at Truman’s Bait and Tackle in Yarmouth, with the staff of Nelson’s Bait and Tackle in Provincetown, and with Austin Proudfoot at Goose Hummock, a shop in Orleans that coincidentally specializes in kayaks and tuna — though until Lamoureux came along, not in both at once.

Proudfoot fixed Lamoureux up with Van Staal rods and Fin-Nor reels, heavy duty-spinning equipment, and came up with the idea of using frozen ballyhoo, a sort of miniature swordfish, as bait.

“You wrap the beak with wire and you rig it

; that’s the attraction,” Proudfoot said, adding, “When Dave first came in and said what he wanted, I sort of giggled and I thought, That’s impossible. Now I tell him, ‘Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it right.’ ”

Learning on the job, Lamoureux hooked 14 tuna before he finally caught one. There are five steps, he explained.

First you have to hook the fish, which strikes suddenly and violently — “sort of like a raging bull,” he said. Then there’s the ride, which is the scariest part but also “the most fun thing I’ve ever done.” After that you have to fight the fish until it dies of exhaustion.

This can take hours and entails steering the tuna — Lamoureux won’t say how — and controlling its speed with the drag on the reel.

Bluefins are powerful enough, he said, that if given too little line, they can cause a kayak to flip end over end. When they get close enough, commercial fishermen harpoon a tuna, but Lamoureux right away realized that that would be a disaster from a kayak.

“Even I’m bright enough not to do that,” he said, laughing.

At the end, the fish must be attached to the kayak and towed home, which is harder than it sounds, especially if, as Lamoureux hopes one day soon, it is a 300- or 400-pounder — enough weight to drag someone under. He has that part, too, all figured out, but don’t hold your breath waiting for him to tell you how.

[FlyingFossil]

While somehow I think it would be fun, I dont fancy the paddle all the way back to shore

[acidmase]

Now thats just to dangerous for my taste!

[shrink]

He's lucky that a big shark didn't grab the tuna while he was paddling it back in. Now that would have been exciting!

[Ken Gargett]

He's lucky that a big shark didn't grab the tuna while he was paddling it back in. Now that would have been exciting!

an extremely good reason for not doing this in our waters. tho they do.

[acidmase]

Some people just need that rush!

[joeypots]

I live and fish the area where this guy took those fish. If you don't know, a blue fin tuna is a great game fish. They can get big, like 6-800 LBS. They feed voraciously and jump out of the water when they are really active. Old timers liken fighting a big one to hooking a small car. I'd say he is reckless if anything. a fish like that could drag him 10-15 miles pretty quick and if he was determined to catch it he could have found himself way out and alone in the Atlantic ocean. Luckily he had a medium size or small one. A big one could really move! Hopefully he had a VHS radio so he could call for help if he got in trouble. The current at the race can be huge. The water is deep and the tide fierce. Thats why there are big fish and lots of whales there. If he got knocked out of his kayak he would drift fast at any tide. Sharks are not a big problem yet because seals were rare for many years. But now with a huge surge in the populations of many kinds of seals there are more sharks. Makos and blues with an occasional great white being spotted! But since sharks hunt seals I'd worry less about shark attack than I would worry about the real danger of being swept away in current. Loads of people catch blue fish and striped bass from kayaks, but big blue fins are an entirely different thing, as the photo shows. The locals are split between him being a great angler and a lunatic. He is probably a disaster waiting to happen.

[Miami101]

Looks like fun my kind of fun!

[thechenman]

Like the man says...it is all about risk and weighing the options. For him the list of pros was greater than the cons. While many might not agree with his decision, it does appear that while dangerous he took many precautions in the effor to inconvenince no one, but himself except maybe in the most dire of circumstances. I'm sure when someone started heli-sking people were saying the same thing they are saying about this fisherman.

[Ken Gargett]

may be he is not so stupid. this from the london times!

<H1 class=heading>Giant bluefin tuna sells for £111,000 in Japan</H1><H2 class="sub-heading padding-top-5 padding-bottom-15"></H2> Leo Lewis in Tokyo Japan consumes 44,000 tons a year of bluefin tuna

div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;} A mighty bluefin tuna, representing 16,000 slices of the world’s most expensive sashimi, has sold in Japan’s first auction of the year for Y16.28 million (£111,000) - a price that no buyer has come close to for nearly a decade.

The 232.6 kilogram monster went under the hammer for 60 per cent more than the most expensive fish at sold at last year’s auction - a sign that Asia at least may be putting the financial crisis behind it and descending once again on its high-end sushi bars.

The tuna, selected for what its buyers believe will be perfect taste and consistency, was sold to a joint bid by two restaurateurs: the same pair that bought the most expensive tuna in January 2009. One was the owner of Kyubey - a Michelin-starred restaurant just a few minutes’ walk from the icy mayhem of the Tsukiji auction floor.

A few short hours after the auction, one Kyubey chef told The Times, a small part of the tuna’s fatty underbelly had already been served to diners as sushi in what may go down as one of the great gourmet bargains of all time. The huge amount paid for the tuna that morning was written-off by the restaurant as an “engimono” talisman for new year luck. The lucky Tuesday night diners paid a normal menu price for the sushi. The chef would not even calculate how much he had lost on those few mouthfuls.

function slideshowPopUp(url){pictureGalleryPopupPic(url);return false;}<H3 class=section-heading>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle6969903.ece </H3>The other member of the joint bid was the owner of a sushi chain in Hong Kong - restaurants that have flourished as China’s financial capital has boomed and its stock market soared.

The bluefin, which was landed off Japan’s northern Aomori coast in a spot famous for producing the most delicious tuna, was sold in the closely-watched New Year auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market: an event which gauges worldwide appetite for sushi and sets the pricing tone for the rest of the year.

The annual sale, which draws sellers of tuna caught in waters around the world, is now even more closely scrutinised for signs of strain in global tuna stocks. 570 tunas went on sale in Tokyo today in what Tsukiji veterans said was a clear decline of high quality available fish. Attendees at the regular morning tuna auctions say that shipments are down more than 30 per cent from their peak and prices are some 40 per cent higher than they were a few years ago.

Bluefin stocks have raised particular concern and Japan has been widely criticised for its status as the world’s largest consumer of the rapidly vanishing species at 44,000 tons per year. Tougher fishing restrictions and serious regional depletions are also expected to push prices higher as the dark red flesh grows rarer and more highly prized by sushi aficionados in Japan and elsewhere.

A meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas set the annual tuna catch limits in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean at 40 per cent below previous levels.

Japanese restaurant owners and high-end food stores are now in open panic over future supplies of tuna, fearing that prices could rise to the point where the fish will effectively be off the menu to ordinary people. But many believe that point cannot come soon enough.

One emerging school of thought holds that Japan should shed its “modern” love affair with sushi and prepare to embrace a diet from its more austere past. Masayuki Komatsu, a long serving minister in Japan’s fisheries agency recently told The Times that Japanese should now accept that bluefin tuna would soon be far beyond the budgets of normal people. Sushi, he added, should go from being an everyday dining experience to a dish only served on special occasions. The current situation, where restaurants in Tokyo can serve a heap of raw bluefin tuna on a bed of rice for about £5, must be considered unsustainable, said Prof Komatsu.

[Colt45]

may be he is not so stupid. this from the london times!

I read about this earlier today. Where the kayaker caught his fish, you need a commercial permit (different than fishing permit) to sell the catch.

And then there's the all important aspect of how the fish is handled after catching - bleeding, icing etc, in order for it to be salable - tough from

a kayak.

[thechenman]

I'd mount that sucker as a trophy...

[Ken Gargett]

i thought it a shame that he didn't release it.

[android]

Nice fish and good eating!

[samb]

Its the chicken of the sea.

[joeypots]

Scientists around here say that the Blue Fin fishery is unsustainable. Some say that every fish that has been commercially harvested has been decimated. The Blue Fin migrate all over the Atlantic and Mediterranean and are caught en masse by the Italians in huge nets and pens. The old prices that brought $240,000.00 fish are long gone. Twenty plus years ago during the huge Japanese economic boom was when the fish brought the most unbelievable prices. One guy I know told me last summer that he was getting something like $10 a pound. There may have been an uptic in price, but It isn't 1990. One has long needed a commercial license to sell the fish, just this year I hear we will need a license to fish recreationally for any salt water species. The guys who catch these fish commercially will radio a buyer when they have a good one on the boat and will be met at the dock. The fish are graded on the spot and the ones that meat the standard of freshness, fat content, etc. are bought on the spot and are quickly shipped to Japan. The vast majority of Blue Fin are eaten as described in the above article, as a form of fast food in Japan. It is a rare fish that gets graded as a super and loads of them are frozen. I'm just talking Cape Cod Bay and Stellwagen Bank Bank here, I don't know anything about how it's done in other places.

Here is a local fishing report.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http:/...-AdKt4Qbt5OWFAw

Make no mistake, the boat owns the fish! Even at $10 a pound a big fish is a good day's pay.

One of the great fishing books is

Mcclane's Fishing Encyclopedia.

The entry on Blue Fin Tuna is worth the price alone. I think it's been out of print for a while but it is on Ebay. If you fish ya gotta have this book.

Joe

[Taino]

...ultimately is a good excuse to end up un Cuba!!