Source:  Speakeasy Blog from Wall Street Journal

Televised fishing used to be something that you’d watch on sleepy Saturday afternoons. But the National Geographic Channel has put an adventuresome “Perfect Storm” spin onto their new reality show “Wicked Tuna” which follows the crew of five commercial Gloucester, Mass. fishing boats on their seasonal hunt for bluefin tuna. Because of the dwindling bluefin population, the law restricts these fishermen to using rod, reel and harpoon to catch the giant tuna, which can bring in as much as $20,000 each. So each trip out into the Atlantic, which costs $3,000 in bait, fuel and expenses, is either bonanza or bust for the working class crew. Speakeasy spoke with cast member and fisherman David Marciano, who is captain of the Hard Merchandise.

Speakeasy: How did you get onto the show?

Marciano: Pilgrim Productions, who produced the show, were here in Gloucester for 10 days and were on 10 or 15 other boats and doing a little fishing to see what it’s about. They came to me and told me they’d heard my name mentioned a few times. On their last day here, I did a 45-minute video interview and the rest, they say, is history.

There seems to be a lot of tension between the different boat captains on the show but you guys still seem to rely on each other to find good fishing spots. Is how do you balance that?

Literally, up until the show, I’d never spoke with any of these other guys. We come from different schools. We usually stick with our own clubs. With the guys I regularly work with, that were not on the show, when we’d go out to George’s [Bank] we’d make sure we’d all come back with fish. But here, it’s every man for themselves. So there are some trust issues.

How much of your business comes from bluefin tuna?

A quarter of my income comes from bluefin, maybe a little more if we have a good season.

How do bluefin compare to other fish?

Without a doubt, it’s the most exciting of all the fishing we do because it’s done with poles and harpoons. All the mechanical stuff is taken away so it’s getting back to basics. Everything else we do is gill-netting for ground fish on the bottom. That’s very labor intensive.

Are bluefin pretty difficult to catch? They seem very elusive on the show.

What’s really tricky about giant bluefin tuna is that they are visual feeders. They see with seven times the magnification of the human eyes. So the game is for us to fool the fish that are looking at our bait. So we have to use as small of hooks as we can that still gives us a chance to reel them in. Sometimes, we’ll see them there in the chum slick just a foot below the water. And they’ll eat every piece of chum we throw into the water except for the one with the hook in it.

How do they actually film the fish biting the bait? Do they have a photographer in the water or a camera mounted below the surface?

It’s pretty neat, actually. They used a camera on a pole and they have a video screen on the end of the pole.

In the first episode, you came back empty-handed. Is that pretty common?

If you can catch a fish 30 to 40 percent of the time, that’s a pretty good average if you look at the number of days that we fish per year.

Do you think conservation efforts have been effective? Or are bluefin still close to being endangered?

Oh yeah, absolutely. There was a lot less fish maybe 15 or 20 years ago. We had really small quotas then because of the condition of the stock. Literally, we’d have 7 to 10 days and the quota would be caught. Today, we can go 100 days and only catch 80 or 90 percent of our quota. We never seem to actually get that quota. I’m not saying there aren’t still problems. But we’re moving in the right direction.

Would you recommend commercial fishing as a good job these days?