The Intrepid Tuna Tales
A can of St. Jude truffle infused tuna, perfect for a portable mountaintop treat
I must preface this article by disclosing that I have fallen prey recently, like many late 20, early 30 urbanites who find themselves walking around gourmet grocery stores debating if paying $30 for a pound of local truffle-infused butter and a pack of seeded crackers is a refined or harebrained decision, to the tinned fish trend. I was always susceptible to this kind of thing, what with my reckless abandon at the farmers market, and my vulnerability to eye-catching packaging and food items that can be brandished on mountaintops. So when I was working on launching this publication, an interview with St. Jude Tuna, a staple at Seattle grocery stores, farmers markets, and my pantry, was on the top of my list.
I originally got in touch with Joe’s wife, Joyce, who informed me that Joe loves to chat about his business/passion. If it wasn’t for a dinner engagement that required me to sign off after an hour and a half, I have good reason to believe Joe would have regaled me with tales of the high seas for a good portion of the evening. I came into this conversation as a tinned fish aficionado but was swept up in Joe’s lifetime of adventure and first-hand account of how the fishing industry has evolved over the last half-century.
The farmers market tuna display
The year is 1978. Joe Malley has just finished his Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the Univeristy of Oregon with a job lined up as a general manager of an aircraft parts distributor company. But like many recent college graduates, he was itching for something a little less, well, conventional. His girlfriend at the time had a brother-in-law who was a commercial fisherman in Petersburg, Alaska, and who invited Joe to join him for a weeklong trip. Without hesitation, Joe made his way to Petersburg, where he found 18 inches of snow and while he didn’t make significant wages, the captain made more in 8 days than a semester’s wages for a college professor (Joe’s aspiration at the University of Oregon). So equipped with an 8-day fishing trip, and without having ever captained a boat, he borrowed some money and bought his first vessel. To top off this well-thought-out plan, he hired his college roommate, who had never been fishing before, as a deckhand. What could possibly go wrong?
Whether he could have anticipated it or not, it just so happened that fishery regulations changed that first year Joe set out salmon trolling. Joe says in a good year, a fleet (made up of around 1,000 trollers, could hope to real in 350,000-500,000 king salmon annually, but that year the state of Alaska set a cap of 156,000 king salmon, which meant fishermen would be operating on a third of their regular catch. No longer able to make a living on King, Joe switched to silver and cohos and then eventually to halibut and black cod. He bought a bigger boat–a 48-foot troller called the Kelly Marie–to fish further afield. He would take the Kelly Marie to Kodiak and beyond–to Dutch Harbor and the Aleutians. Joe says he certainly wasn’t rich, but he was getting by.
But then the cod and halibut industries in Alaska also started to suffer. There was no limited entry (laws restricting fishermen to one permit per fishery) for long-line fisheries (a method of ocean fishing where a long line with baited hooks attached is trailed behind a boat) as there had been for salmon. So anybody with a boat and $150 for a license could fish halibut and black cod in Alaska. As other fisheries in states such as Washington increased their longline fishery regulations, more and more fishermen flocked to the unregulated fisheries in Alaska, making them more competitive. Alaskan fisheries responded by shortening the halibut and cod seasons every year until what once was a year-long season became a one-day-a-year season for halibut and less than a month for black cod.
With only one day to fish halibut, you had to put out enough gear to catch a year's worth of halibut in a day. Hauling all that gear in before the 24-hour fishing window closed and releasing excess fish could be impossible. Joe recalls seeing abandoned gear on the way back from Kodiak to Sitka, which meant it was full of fish that somebody had caught and left to die.
The severely shortened seasons also encouraged some shady activity. Joe shared a story of a man who fled the boat he was working on because of how deplorable their fishing practices were and wound up looking for refuge on the Kelly Marie. In exchange for money for airfare, the man sold Joe a tape that showed the deck of the boat, three or four feet deep in dying halibut. They couldn’t keep all that halibut, so they opened the floodgates and dumped the bodies. The boat used a technique called bottom trawling, where you drag a football field-sized weighted net across the ocean floor, disturbing marine habitat, and, according to Joe, catching “all of god’s great creatures of the oceans” in the process. The boat was targeting rockfish, but catching about 30 50-pound halibut for every 6-pound rockfish. Joe was raised with the ethos of a sport fisherman, and the idea of all that fish just being left to rot made him sick. Another implication of the short fishing windows is that boats would set out even in perilous conditions. Joe says about half the guys that started in that fishery around the same time as him, died at sea.
The St. Jude on a stormy day
Tired of the callousness of the halibut and cod fisheries, Joe sought an essentially unregulated fishery–and came across albacore tuna. Albacore is fished mainly on the high seas, outside any 200-mile country limit, so there is not really any governing body. There are international conventions that regulate heinous activities such as high seas gillnets, which, similar to bottom trawling, catch almost everything. But other than that, the albacore fishery is both unregulated and a troll fishery, a highly selective form of fishing in which there is minimal bycatch (not to be confused with trawling). Joe says that as a troller, for every 12,000 albacore, you might catch five extraneous fish, such as ono or mahi mahi, which the St. Jude crew will keep and eat themselves. According to Joe, “It was a great privilege to get involved in a fishery like that.” So Joe started fishing for Albacore, and the St. Jude tuna brand was born (By this time, Joe had upgraded to a 95-foot fishing vessel called the St. Jude).
In some ways, albacore fishing is very accessible. You just have to have the boat and a permit. On the other hand, it's a high-seas fishery covering thousands of miles. According to Joe, you’ve got to have your act together to travel that far. This means having weeks or months worth of fuel and groceries on board. There's also no way to get help quickly in an emergency–Joe’s crew once had to perform surgery on one of their crew members. But then there’s the freedom and the places you go and people you meet along the way. Joe says, “You untie from the dock, and you're off. No one will tell you what to do or where to do it. We aren't treated like tourists when we go somewhere like Tahiti, Fiji, or Samoa. We’re there on business, and the community accepts us as such.”
In the world of premium tinned fish, there are many claims about these products being healthier and more sustainable than the standard options. But there is a lot of grey area, and accusations and terminology get thrown around. Joe broke down the differences between his product and the cans that populate grocery store shelves. Not all of these standard tuna are created equal, but this will give you a general idea of some distinctions.
The Malleys at the Ballard Farmers Market
The tuna in your run-of-the-mill can of Starkist or Bumblebee–let’s call it conventionally canned tuna for lack of a better overarching term – is caught by longlining, the gear for which consists of miles of light rope with baited hooks spliced into the rope at intervals. The line is anchored and buoyed at both ends and is stretched across the bottom, and allowed to “soak” there for 12-24 hours. Lines are set to the target depth for the tuna, but they can also hook sharks and other non-target species. The St. Jude uses troll fishing (not to be confused with trawling), or poll and line fishing, in which albacore are caught individually on hooks and lures dragged behind the boat. Since the fish are caught individually, there is very little bycatch.
There is also a difference in the types of albacore that end up in the tin. The St. Jude mainly catches young albacore (around 3-5 years old), which weigh around 15 pounds. Joe says the fish that end up in mainstream cans are older albacore, around 15 to 20 years old, and clocking in at about 50 pounds. The age and size of the tuna have health and flavor implications. The older and larger the fish, the more mercury it has amassed because it eats higher on the food chain and has accumulated more mercury over a lifetime. Also, since young tuna eat lower on the food chain, they don’t have to work very hard for the anchovies, squid, and krill that sustain them, and the albacore are therefore fatty and full of Omega-3s. Later in life, albacores expend many more calories chasing larger fish and become lean, losing those nutrients and rich flavor.
The other major differences between St. Jude and the other brands are in regards to storage and processing. The first thing the St. Jude crew does is bleed out the albacore–an essential step for sushi–and brain-stun them ( a painless process), stabilizing their body temperature so they don’t bruise. Then the tuna is frozen. For the big brands, tuna is considered acceptable if it is below 16 degrees when it reaches the processing facility. St. Jude tuna is rapidly frozen to 35 below, locking in the moisture and preserving the texture.
A post-ski tin with a view in Revelstoke, BC
When it is time to defrost the albacore, most companies spray the fish with water and leave it in the sun to thaw. The St. Jude process involves defrosting the fish overnight with fans (at Pelican Packers in Bellingham) and without water so the flavor and nutrients are not washed away. Then the fish are filleted and cut into steaks. Most other brands cook the fish twice–once before it is canned and once after–and vegetable broth is added to the can before the second cooking to enhance the flavor. St. Jude tuna is cooked only once, in the can in its own juices and with some salt and spices. As I can attest, this process has profound effects on the flavor.
I regularly find myself wondering if I will eventually overdo it on the fish front. But Joe has yet to grow weary of eating albacore tuna. He says it’s an ideal fish because you can do so much with it. But when I asked him about his favorite way to eat it, his answer is simple: Nigiri style, draped across a small mound of sushi rice with a dab of wasabi and a dribble of soy sauce. Due to laziness, though, and unintentionally on trend, he more frequently eats his tuna out of a can.
Joe has mostly hung up his captain hat. When his son was born, he came fishing for the first few years, but then school and other commitments ended that. For the last 15 years, Joe has hired a captain and crew to run the St. Jude. But two years ago, his captain found out his father was sick, and Joe agreed to take the St. Jude to Samoa so the captain could spend time with his family. The plan was that the captain would fly to Samoa, take over the boat, and Joe could fly home. Joe packed light since he was only meant to sail through tropical locales. But when he got to Samoa, the captain informed Joe he would not make it. So for six months, Joe captained the boat through the South Pacific–with three pairs of shorts, no rain gear, no fishing stuff, and no plan–the same way he started.