We have had an interesting tag return. In the summer of 2007, we took the Healthy Grin on a tuna trip for Dr. John Graves of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. We were targeting less than 27-inch bluefin tuna that I had received some reports of between the Norfolk and Washington Canyons. We had Nelson and Di Ortiz onboard for their first tuna trip. They are fellow members of the Peninsula Salt Water Sport Fisherman’s Association and at the time, Nelson was the President of the Peninsula CCA. We started at the Norfolk Canyon and trolled all the way up to the Washington Canyon where we found the tuna. We did not find the little bluefin we were looking for. We started catching yellowfin tuna in the 40-pound class and then one of the tuna that came over the gunnel was a bluefin tuna. We had a permit to harvest sub-legal bluefin but did not want to keep any more of that size. To make sure we did not mistakenly gaff other bluefin we just opened the tuna door, grabbed the leader, and slid them in. Yellowfin tuna went into the fish box while bluefin tuna were tagged and slid back out the door. Di caught a 45-inch bluefin tuna that we estimated at 40 pounds. The fish was tagged with a Tag-a-Tiny tag from Dr. Molly Lutcavage’s Large Pelagics Research Center. The Billfish Foundation helps collect recapture reports through their tag reporting system and they called me to tell me the Di’s fish had been recaptured. The fish was re-caught about 7 years later, June 2014, in the Mediterranean Sea and was taken to one of the fattening pens off Malta where it was kept until it was harvested in November. The fish was recaptured about 5,000 miles from where we had released it and it weighed 616 pounds when it was harvested.
