Tales of Swordfish and Tuna

THE 1919 season for tuna at Avalon was the best for many years. What it might have been if the round-haul net-boats had not haunted the channel, taking thousands of tons of tuna, no one could conjecture. Tuna were never before seen there in such numb... Read more

THE 1919 season for tuna at Avalon was the best for many years. What it might have been if the round-haul net-boats had not haunted the channel, taking thousands of tons of tuna, no one could conjecture. Tuna were never before seen there in such numbers, both large and small.But no matter how wonderful the fishing, it was spoiled by the Austrian and Jap net-boats. These round-haul boats have nets half a mile long and several hundred feet deep. When they surround a school of tuna it is seldom that any escape. If the tuna are very large, over one hundred pounds, then a great many of them are destroyed. Sometimes the weight of a large school is so great that the netters cannot handle it. In which case they take on board all they can dispose of and let the rest sink. Some of the tons of tuna go to the canneries at San Pedro, and a good many of them go to the fertilizer plants. These market fishermen are aliens, and they break the state and federal laws every day during the season. Catalina Island has a three-mile limit, inside of which no net-boat is permitted to haul. One day this season I counted sixteen round-haul net-boats within half a mile of Avalon Bay, and some of them were loaded so heavily that they sank in the water nearly to their gunwales, and the others were hauling their nets as fast as power and muscle could do it. I counted twenty Aus-trians pulling on one net. It was so full of tuna that they could scarcely budge it. Less