Thanks for the question and the opportunity.
I've been fishing a long time, as I said, and through the late seventies and early eighties I can remember coming home from Baccalieu in the afternoons and late evenings, and we'd look out in the bay, looking over this way toward St. John's, and on occasion after occasion we saw large tuna leaping out of the water. Then they were gone for 30 years. I never saw one for 30 years and never heard of anybody seeing one until three years ago. Now they're back, and they're back big time. There are a lot of them. There's a lot of tuna. I talked to a fisherman from Old Perlican the other day, and he and his partner were out in a speedboat gutting the fish and throwing the guts overboard. The gulls were eating the liver, and as the remains the gulls weren't eating were sinking, a school of 10 or 12 tuna, smaller tuna, was around the boat eating them up.
On Friday, out the north end of Baccalieu, where I fish, a tuna leaped out of the water no more than about 50 feet from the boat. When we were hauling the net, one fish rolled out of the net and was floating and trying to get down, and within seconds this tuna came from under the boat somewhere and just grabbed it. It was the biggest tuna I've ever seen, and I've seen some at 1,000 pounds.
They landed them here in the bay years ago. There was one landed that was 800 pounds by the rod-and-reel guy from Portugal Cove. He landed it in Bay de Verde on Friday evening, but this one that took the codfish was way bigger than that. There's a lot of tuna coming back in the area, and that's a predator fish too, but it's also unfortunate that none of our fishermen have the opportunity to fish it, because we don't have a licence for it. Most of the licences now are in P.E.I. and the Nova Scotia area.