NH - From the Gulf of Maine to a tin can: A glimpse into high-end tuna production on NH's coast
Rather than sell his bluefin to a wholesaler, where cuts may end up in a fishmonger’s display case, or as toro on a sushi menu, Connell is doing something that nobody else in the U.S. is apparently doing.
We’d been texting all summer.
Keper Connell, a fisherman from Rye with 20 years of experience on the water, wanted me to come see a fish.
When the day finally arrived, I met Connell at a fish processing facility in Seabrook, with the nuclear plant in the background. It was nine in the morning, but Connell’s day had started hours earlier. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt with the words: ‘I shuck on the first date.’
“I left today at, like, 12 midnight,” he said, his face hidden behind mirrored sunglasses and a beard. “And then it's about an hour and a half ride out, and it was beautiful last night because that big fat moon is waning.”
Connell is a one-man operation aboard his boat, The Figment. When conditions allow, he cruises into the Gulf of Maine in search of bluefin tuna, a torpedo-shaped fish that can reach more than 1,000 pounds. These bluefin migrate each summer from the Gulf of Mexico, enticed by a buffet of smaller fish.
“The same reason that these fish are here is the same reason that the whales are here,” he says. “There's a lot of herring and what we call forage: so mackerel, and there's some sand eels there and there's some squid…all the sort of fundamentals of the Gulf of Maine.”
Connell has been a lobsterman and led charter fishing for trophy hunters, but these days, he’s all in on the bluefin. When he’s out on his boat, he sleeps for an hour at a time, waking up to check on his 200-pound monofilament lines.
"Sometimes . . . they make a mistake"
Federal regulators closely monitor the taking of bluefins, dictating the season and catch limits But the giants aren’t endangered in these waters, and they’re still prized for their meat and the fight they put up.
“They are supreme, and they dictate everything in the water column, but they're so aggressive that sometimes they just can't help themselves and they make a mistake,” he says.
Once hooked, the battle can take an hour, sometimes stretching to a few hours. Connell, alone in deep waters, works under a spotlight attached to The Figment. The day I met him, he’d first felt the tuna hit his line at 3 a.m. As the fish tires, he says, the first glimpse comes into view.
“All of a sudden you see the fish, and it's this green glow from the water,” he says. Then more colors appear as the fish comes closer to the boat. Once it's alongside, Connell throws a harpoon into the fish: backup in case the monofilament breaks. Then, it's a wrap around the tailfin, and the tuna gets winched over the side of the boat.
