As an avid fisherman I just have to say this is totally wrong. So long as he has tags he should have been able to keep the fish unless they prove he targeted the fish somehow using illegal fishing tactics.
This fish story may lack the epic qualities of Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 classic “The Old Man and the Sea,” but for New Bedford’s Carlos Rafael, the outcome was about the same. In both cases, despite catching and bringing home a huge fish, powerful circumstances conspired to deprive the fishermen of a potentially huge reward.
Boat owner Rafael, a big player in the local fishing industry, was elated when the crew of his 76-foot steel dragger Apollo told him they’d caught a giant bluefin tuna in their trawl gear.
“We didn’t catch that fish on the bottom,” he said. “We probably got it in the midwater when we were setting out and it just got corralled in the net. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Rafael, who in the last four years purchased 15 tuna permits for his groundfish boats to cover just such an eventuality, immediately called a bluefin tuna hot line maintained by fishery regulators to report the catch.
When the weather offshore deteriorated, the Apollo decided to seek shelter in Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 12. Rafael immediately set off in a truck to meet the boat.
“I wanted to sell the fish while it was fresh instead of letting it age on the boat,”he said.“It was a beautiful fish.”
It was also a lucrative one. Highly prized in Japan, a 754pound specimen fetched a record price at a Tokyo auction in January this year, selling for nearly $396,000. These fish can grow to enormous size. The world record for a bluefin, which has stood since 1979, was set when a 1,496-pound specimen was caught off Nova Scotia.
However, when Rafael rolled down the dock in Provincetown there was an unexpected and unwelcome development. The authorities were waiting. Agents from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement informed him they were confiscating his fish — all 881 pounds of it.
Even though the catch had been declared and the boat had a tuna permit, the rules do not allow fishermen to catch bluefin tuna in a net.
