Albacore Tuna Video & Mercury *rant*

Well its been quite a season so far.  Hit and miss.. great opening but now the warm water is getting harder to find.  We’ve been out of computer range for a while but now we lost the hydraulics on the last run, so time to get all the action together  for a big world newspaper blog post right while the boat is getting a fix yeah? Ahem ..

A certain Captain *lost* at least 2 gigs of albacore video off the SD cards from this season. Well he’s been busy and we’re pretty sure either it got some bacon drippings on it so could well be the dog ate it or maybe baby Hannah munched it down .. we’re checking the diapers. Like Capt Tyler said ” F*ing things need to be 5″ square like the good old days” — true but the camera would also be 10 inches wide and weigh 30 lbs!!

Still managed to cull some off internal memory all CSI:Langlois on yer arse Here is Burt pulling a few

Albacore Tuna Season 2009 Video

So we’re hopeful that the lost video will show up and we’ve got some sweet shots of humbolt squid as well… if we can find them.

But as you can see the troll caught tuna are pretty small.  We like them that way.  The whole mercury in tuna issue has really hurt the industry as folk are worried about mercury levels in the tuna they eat — and rightly so.   The older the fish, the more mercury they’ve accumulated over the years so if you catch younger fish the toxin levels are much less (see http://www.theoceanharvest.com/content/low-mercury-tuna ).  So while it’s fun to pull in the big dogs, we’d all much rather eat smaller, younger fish and let big ones go — so they can breed the next generation.  You can thank the coal plants for a lot of that mercury in the ocean.   Funny how the Klamath farmers and the coal companies have such big pull in Washington  but family owned  fishing  off Oregon has near zero influence .. like how we lost ANOTHER SALMON SEASON  .. but that’s another story

Till then ..

-The Harvester Crew