A Short but Sweet Bluefin Tuna Season

The fishing for bluefin tuna over the last five weeks or so has been nothing short of outstanding.

But now the party is over.

The regulators at NOAA have decided that recreational anglers have filled the quota allowed for the angling category this year. Commercial fishing, or general category, fishing remains open.

It’s a shame, because the fishing was just getting warmed up. The so-called medium class of bluefin have still not really arrived in large numbers in the waters off the South Fork, and plenty of anglers have been looking on enviously as New Jersey and New York Bight anglers decked tuna pushing 200 pounds.

But we were catching too many tuna here, too.

At the start of this year, NOAA informed bluefin aficionados that because the bluefin category had been overfished by nearly half again as much as was allowed to the U.S. for the spring fishery (largely because all unpopular regulatory actions were paused at the start of the new president’s administration back in January), there were going to have to be big changes to tuna rules to keep the recreational sector fishing without “overfishing” the stock. The daily catch limit went from three fish down to one.

Initially, the rules-makers said that only fish between 28 inches and 47 inches could be kept. But they backtracked after outcry and gave us up to 72 inches. At the time, ironically, I had said that was a great relief, because a) the bigger bluefin are the ones that the most dedicated inshore tuna anglers want to catch, and b) we haven’t had an abundance of fish under 47 inches in our waters in recent years — mostly, we’ve had fish much bigger than that.

Well, this year, the small 30-to-50-pound tuna were (are) everywhere, of course. And they were pretty darned easy to catch.

Fishing was so easy that just about anybody with an 18-foot boat, a jigging rod and a couple of irons could go out and catch a bluefin as close as five miles south off Montauk at times.

That’s great for the angling community and the fishing industry. But the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas has done a superb job of helping bluefin stocks recover through sound management and quotas that doled out the killing of bluefin tuna like precious morsels, so that there will be more for everyone down the road from now. So an early closure of the fishing was almost inevitable.

There are some grumblings that perhaps the recreational fishery will be reopened come September, or maybe October, but nothing I’ve read from NOAA sounds like anything but: “No tuna for you — come back one year!”

So we tuna hounds go in search of yellowfin and bigeyes — both of which have been abundant as well this year.

There are some fluke, but the fishing has not been red-hot anywhere. There are some striped bass starting to filter back into our waters, and there are always the hopes for a robust fall run getting rolling early, if the cool temps come in the next few weeks.

Catch ’em up. See you out there.