Key West Best Selections

Fishing Report/Fishy Stories!

There's no longer a hook about canned tuna.

One afternoon last month, Capt. Steven Rodger of Key West jumped over the side of his charter boat and sank a four-foot-long spear into a yellowfin tuna about the size of an NFL running-back.

Rodger's catch was the quintessential example of dolphin-safe tuna fishing. The 195-pound yellowfin was feeding near the surface off Key West when Rodger shot it at point blank range.

The wounded yellowfin circled and darted by Rodger and his friend, Jake Perry, who was also free diving. "That spear missed the both of us by just a couple feet," Perry said. The fish plunged into the blue depths trailing orange buoys and 700 feet of line. Rodger and his crew dragged the fish aboard the Spear One about a half hour later.

When you eat fresh yellowfin tuna in the Keys this time of year, you can be fairly certain that the fish was caught in a method that posed no risk to the air-breathing dolphins that often feed on fish together with yellowfins.

Spear-fishing is, of course, an extreme example of dolphin-safe fishing. Neither Rodger nor Perry could recall anyone ever spearing a yellowfin while free-diving here. Most local yellowfins are caught on hook and line by sport fishermen, and then sold to restaurants by charter captains with appropriate permits.

Thanks to a New Year's Eve surprise from the Bush administration, the definition of what constitutes a "dolphin safe" fishing practice has been watered down to the point where the term no longer makes sense. The definition is critical because 85 percent of the canned tuna sold in the U.S. sports the label "Dolphin Safe."

The National Marine Fisheries Service has redefined "Dolphin Safe" so that tuna caught by encircling dolphin with nets can bear the "Dolphin Safe" label. Commercial fishermen, especially in the Pacific, often find yellowfin tuna by spotting pods of dolphin feeding wildly at the surface. The fishermen deploy nets up to a mile long around the dolphin and tighten the nets like nooses to trap the tuna feeding below. The trouble is, the air-breathing dolphin sometimes drown.

NOAA announced the controversial decision at 1 p.m. on New Year's Eve when most editorial minds were elsewhere.

The same U.S. agency that has implored the general public not to interact with wild dolphin, now says that "dolphin can be encircled or chased [by fishermen], but no dolphins can be killed or seriously injured in the [net] set in which the tuna was harvested."

Bill Hogarth, the NOAA assistant administrator in charge of fisheries, defended the decision in a telephone interview Friday. He said the decision was one of the "toughest" in his 30 years of managing fishing.

"What we've done is said, 'If you encircle dolphin and do not kill or injure them, you can have the dolphin-safe label and access to the U.S. market," he explained.

International fishing fleets have been pioneering methods of encircling dolphin without killing them, Hogarth explained. They have been doing this largely in hopes of winning access to the vast U.S. market, he said. Commercial fishing operators have cut dolphin mortality dramatically by sending fishermen out in smaller boats to release any dolphin that might be trapped in the net, he said.

"Speaking from the perspective of a fishermen, if I can't get access to the U.S. market, why should I take these risks?" Hogarth said.

Hogarth said the United States would work to tighten up regulations in some areas. He said the United States would work harder to ensure that international dolphin observers are not "bribed or paid off" by the host countries, which is widely suspected.

He said the United States also would "look at" the possibility of expanding tuna regulations to cover smaller vessels of less than "400 short tons" (about 150 feet long), which right now are not covered.

Kudos to Hogarth for realizing that NOAA will have to offset this controversial decision somehow. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that encircling an air-breathing mammal in a net in the middle of the ocean can never be construed as "safe" under any reasonable definition.

And so, the millions of American consumers who also love dolphins will be saying goodbye to tuna-salad for a while.