The Return of The Tuna

[Paul Boote]

In the same week that we saw a visiting Striped bass and some other foreign exotic caught, killed and eaten around our shores, we now have something very large and very rare taken - a huge tuna following the increasing herring shoals northwards once again - as did the fish off Scarborough and Whitby in the 1930s (Taylor, Mitchell-Henry and a host of yacht-owning sporting aristos and their famous Tunny Club) - only to be caught by design then killed off the Scottish island of Harris.

Nine-foot bluefin tuna weighing 515lb caught off the coast of Harris | Scotland | News | STV

Probably best to leave any future returnees be, chaps.

 

[binka]

I recall being amazed some years ago at some very old, flickering black and white footage that had turned up somewhere and appeared on a local regional news channel which showed tweed suited and flat capped gentry looking folk being towed around in small rowing boats just off the coast of Scarborough circa 1930 whilst attached via rod and line to some very large tuna.

Wasn't there some sort of confusion over what was actually the biggest Tunny Club specimen... 851 or 852lb?

I thought this was an interesting read despite its unlikely source...

Tunny fishing in Scarborough

 

[nicepix]

The tuna never went away. It was just that anglers stopped fishing for them due to the austerity if the era.

There is a program situated in Ireland that involves catching, tagging and releasing tuna in order that they can be tracked by satellites. They find that year after year the shoals come up the North Sea heading north. They pass just off the Yorkshire coast before they split, some head east towards Denmark where there is still a fishing industry dependent on them, and the others go around the northern tip of Scotland and back down the Atlantic.

In the 1930's a group of wealthy anglers who had spent time in Catalina, California fishing for tuna invested their time and money in finding the same fish in the North Sea. They had heard tales from offshore herring fishermen of huge mackerel breaking nets as they were being hauled in. Realising that these huge mackerel were probably tuna they hired trawlers and sturdy rowing boats and went out to follow the commercial fishing fleets.

The Fishing Museum Online - Tunny

Fileybay.com looks at big game Tunny fishing off the Yorkshire Coast.

(That last photo isn't Spider's catch at Dam Flask by the way. It was one day's catch for one angler off the Yorkshire coast)

 

[Paul Boote]

Back in 1977, I went to visit a man in Beaconsfield, Bucks, who was advertising an Aerial reel for sale in the Angling Times Classifieds. Nice reel, which I bought.

Then he said to me "I have this old stuff of my father's / uncle's ... any interest to you...?"

Out came a huge 8-inch Hardy Fortuna centrepin, a Hardy "Zane Grey" reel, an Allcock "Tunny" reel, all in lovely, specially made, wooden travelling boxes to house the reels, their tools and little lube gun, a selection of leather fighting harness, some huge hooks and swivels, plus a lovely ship's sextant in a brass-bound wooden case.

It took me two months to find - earn, beg, borrow - the money he wanted for them, with he giving me the time to find it - £300 I think it was, a lot of money then, for me anyway.

I kept the haul until the early 1980s when I needed some money to put a deposit on my first, very small house. An American collector bought the stuff direct from me, for rather more than what I paid for it.

What tackle. Never see its like again.

 

[Steve Handley]

Always been fascinated by the tales of the old Tunny club up in Scarborough and Whitby, such a shame it's no longer going. What a spirit of adventure those anglers of old had. If only I was a millionaire and owned a top of the range Game Fishing boat.......

 

[nicepix]

Always been fascinated by the tales of the old Tunny club up in Scarborough and Whitby, such a shame it's no longer going. What a spirit of adventure those anglers of old had. If only I was a millionaire and owned a top of the range Game Fishing boat.......

It does surprise me that none of the better Yorkshire angling skippers haven't tried to find the tuna. They have worked really hard at making Whitby an excellent venue for big cod and some have been innovative enough to make fishing for halibut worthwhile so it is in my opinion only a mater of time before they have a go at the 'giant mackerel'.

 

[S-Kippy]

It is fascinating. On a whim I bought this and its a damn good read.

Chris Berry TUNNY - The Rise and Fall of Britain's Biggest Fish

Stone bonkers all of them.

 

[Paul Boote]

It was the Yorkshire tunny and the rather grand, very slightly and very nicely mad, pioneering fishers who set out after them and eventually caught them, first glimpsed in the pages of 1930s tackle catalogues and sporting periodicals belonging to an elderly friend of mine in Wales in the early 1970s, that was a big inspiration and motivator for me in 1976 / 77 when I found a book about Indian mahseer in a western edge of London jumble sale, and immediately thought "Cor! I wonder if they're there now ... if anybody's fishing for them....?". They were and there were (in limited and pretty small numbers respectively, I was to discover after setting out for India on a bit of an epic not long afterwards. Just wish I had been around to experience the Yorkshire tunny fishery, though (and Norway's giant salmon, for that matter - sailing one's fully-equipped and well-staffed private yacht into some remote northern fjord in the late 19th Century to battle with, often disastrously, the monsters of the river flowing into it). Still, much smaller and less exotic species are fun if you fish for them in the right spirit.

 

[nicepix]

I recall being amazed some years ago at some very old, flickering black and white footage that had turned up somewhere and appeared on a local regional news channel which showed tweed suited and flat capped gentry looking folk being towed around in small rowing boats just off the coast of Scarborough circa 1930 whilst attached via rod and line to some very large tuna.

Wasn't there some sort of confusion over what was actually the biggest Tunny Club specimen... 851 or 852lb?

I thought this was an interesting read despite its unlikely source...

Tunny fishing in Scarborough

The official world record was 851lb caught by Mitchell-Henry, but a fish of 852lb was later caught and weighed by one of his rivals. Fully story here:

Adventurer, inventor and big game angler Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry was part of that glamorous set. One of those confident, somewhat eccentric “can-do” types thrown up regularly by the last days of the Empire, Mitchell-Henry was a competitive sportsman who was so committed to his quest that he designed a special piece of equipment for his home gym in London to replicate the powerful lunges of a hooked tunny, and used to train on it for up to an hour a day.

Mitchell-Henry was 67 in 1933, the year he landed an 851lb tunny off Whitby and set the record that still stands – barring an unfortunate business in 1949 when Lincolnshire’s John Hedley Lewis caught a tunny that weighed in at 852lb, a weight hotly disputed by Mitchell-Henry, whose fish had been weighed on railway scales, rather than hanging by a rope. Mitchell-Henry contended that the rope, and possibly even the water which soaked it, might have contributed to the final weight.

Because of Mitchell-Henry's challenge the fish was disallowed and his record stood for many more years.