Those Breton thoniers, tunnymen or tuna boats caught my imagination long ago, and it seems the locals cannot forget them either.  You can’t miss the models of them everywhere, even hanging in the churches, and in the bars and shops are pictures with a very plausible explanation of comment naissent les bateaux; a tunny fish gradually transmuting into a thonier, the sails growing out of its back and the pectoral fins transmuting into tangons, the long poles each side of the main-mast that are lowered at sea to spread the lines for trolling. That a whole coastal economy was based on towing hand-lines from those graceful sailing boats, only dying out within my own life-time, has always amazed me, and struck me as one of those blessed occasions when men were actually getting things right for a change.  Did it really have to go? 

    Admittedly it was a hard game, but not impossibly so, or in ways that could not be mitigated by the judicious application of technology.  The massive improvements in communication, weather forecasting and navigation would make a huge difference, for a start.  Nowadays one would know exactly where one was, and have a very good idea of the weather for a few days ahead.  With such advantages as electric reels to handle the lines, and refrigeration to hold the catch, the whole operation would be much more efficient.

    But no, we had to go further.  With the usual modern disdain for aesthetic, or even just plain human, considerations, with unthinking pursuit of ‘progress’ and profit, we had to go over the top. Purse-seining, helicopters and all, pair trawling, even drift-netting, it’s all over-kill.  Now the fishermen who have left the sea to perhaps make money out of the property boom are going to be looking over their shoulders and wonder if they are losing the ability to even feed themselves.  Now at last we are being forced to take sustainability seriously.  Perhaps we shall have to even contemplate the odd little step ‘backwards’....  

Having retired from commercial fishing some years ago, and taken to sail again mostly taking trips in search of whales and dolphins, it was not until this month of September ’07 that the chance finally came to sail in the Anna M in search of tuna.  I have caught them before, on passage, most notably off the Portuguese coast en route to the Cape Verdes in October 2003, and also off the Azores.  But this was the first trip dedicated to the job. Nowadays I have to limit my activities to what someone is willing to pay for, so many thanks to Dermot Breen for making this tuna trip possible.  Also for taking most of these photos.

We were blessed with a great spell of weather, the only question being whether there would be enough wind.  I knew already that one needed to clip along to bring the lures to life.  In fact we were to find that we needed to be doing about 4.5 knots to catch fish.  After that, the faster one goes, the harder it is to land the fish.  Well, the sea was dead calm with scarcely a breath of wind when we, Dermot, Ronan Collins and myself, left Horseshoe Bay on the Thursday afternoon, 6th September.  However, in the evening, a few miles west of the Fastnet, a little breeze sprang up from the NNW. 

Originally I had intended to sail more SW, but to begin with, motor-sailing, it was better to head the wind a little, and then just before phone coverage died, Nick Dent, a Baltimore angling skipper, sent me a text to say that Derick Noble had caught some fish west of Dursey.  We were soon able to stop the engine, the Anna M got into her stride, and we had a blissful night as she cantered out WNW at 6.5 knots, loving the beam reach and calm sea.

We set a couple of lines in the evening, to save ourselves the trouble early in the morning, and lost our first fish before sunrise, around 51º13’, 11º28.  By 0800 we had lost another two, and since we were now doing 7 knots, decided we would have to sail more slowly and took the fisherman topsail off, a very effective 4-cornered reaching sail that goes up between the masts.  We were now towing 5 lines, two from each of the tangons that I had improvised from bamboo dahn poles, and one from the stern of the boat.  I had copied the tangons from Nick Dent; we just let them back aft to attach the lines with rubber bands. 

She blows

So for those to whom the Long/Lat does not speak, the general area was roughly between 80 and 100m west of Sherkin; it’s the nearest bit of continental shelf edge to here, on the east side of the Porcupine Bight.  According to the Met Office sea temperature chart on the web, we were in the vicinity of the 17º contour, which reached its northernmost point for this year about then.  It seemed to me that the sea was actually a little colder than normal in these parts this year, especially in the high summer.  Perhaps this, and the mini winter we had in July, could be put down to the huge amounts of ice melting in the Arctic, that has left the North-west Passage open for the first time ever. 

With regard to lures, we had three fancy American ones lent to me by Nick Dent, some other fairly fancy ones that I had bought in Brittany, two simple veterans from the old Breton tuna fishery that I had been given in Ti Bedeuf, a pub at Port Tudy on the Ile de Groix, along with one of their old double barbless hooks which Ronan fixed up from this and that in the boat.  Well this did as well as any of them; they all caught fish.  But one bad mistake was that I just had the heaviest swivel/clips that I could get in Skibbereen.  Not heavy enough.