Swimming With Bluefin Tuna Lucrative Tourist Businessff

The little tour boat idles outside one of the many mansions in South Australia’s Port Lincoln marina. This particular waterside palace stretches across three blocks and belonged to Tony Santic, tuna millionaire and owner of champion horse Makybe Diva.

”I reckon he had room to stable his horses in there,” says tour operator Graham Daniels, before zipping off to point out the other delights of Australia’s wealthiest fishing port: multimillion-dollar super cruisers (one named The Aussie Battler), a house with an artificial rainforest, salmon pink dream homes with garden statues, huge plasma TVs and extravagant dining settings.

Perhaps the notoriously shy but extremely wealthy tuna fishermen of Port Lincoln — a town with the highest number of millionaires per capita in the country, thanks to the southern bluefin tuna fishery — would not approve of this rubber-necking circuit of their marina. But the times are changing and the other locals are fishing for the tourism dollar.

Now visitors to Port Lincoln — on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula — can tour the marina and swim with bluefin tuna in a pen not unlike those the fishermen use to fatten their stocks (after the fish are caught in the ocean in nets and towed carefully back).

One of the tuna fishermen, Sam Sarin, has also built a four-star hotel at Port Lincoln which is run, among others, by Adelaide Crows players Mark Ricciuto and Simon Goodwin.

Matt Waller, a former skipper on the tuna fleet, has set up his bluefin pen in Boston Bay, off Port Lincoln. While the tuna are worth about $1100 each, they won’t be eaten or sold. Instead, he takes tourists to see the great fish up close: people can swim with them as they dart around eating pilchards. The tuna are about a meter long, smoky black, muscle-bound and capable of swimming in bursts of up to 70 kilometers an hour.

Interest in the tuna industry has been spiked, says Mr Waller, by two documentaries Tuna Cowboys and Tuna Wranglers, and the successes of Tony Santic and that other famous tuna fisherman, Olympic gold-medal-winning weightlifter Dean Lukin.

While the tuna fishermen have been supportive and keen that their industry is portrayed well, Mr. Waller says they have little interest in showing tourists around their farms; it would only be a distraction to the business of exporting sashimi-grade tuna to the Japanese, who pay hundreds, often thousands, of dollars a fish. “That leaves it open for people like us to show tourists what the industry is about,” he said.

Mr. Waller met one of the old tuna fishermen on the street the other day. When Mr. Waller said he had tuna in pens for tourists to swim with, the reply was, well, very much one of fisherman. “Why would you want to do that when you can catch them?” he asked.