Tag Archives: Tuna Fishing Boat
Stranded at Sea in The Time of Coronavirus
Spanish fisherman Josu Bilbao boarded a Qatar Airways flight headed for the Seychelles in January, just as he had done for the past 15 years. Ahead of him, four uninterrupted months of hauling tuna out of the glistening Indian Ocean. As it turned out, catching the fish was the least of the problems for the 56-year-old captain of Albatun Tres, one of the world’s largest tuna fishing boats. The coronavirus then swept the world, countries shut borders, planes stopped flying and Spain became one of the countries worst hit by the virus. Bilbao and his crew were stuck. As the Indian Ocean fleet shift was extended ship owners tried to figure out a way to get workers home. Aboard the ship avoiding infection became the priority. >click to read< 09:43
What It’s Really Like on a Wicked Tuna Fishing Boat
If you add it all up, the days and nights on the water, Captain TJ Ott has probably spent most of his 37 years on a boat. The captain of the 39-foot Hot Tuna is a bear of a man with a scraggly beard who loves the Grateful Dead, and he’ll be the first one to tell you without equivocation that his life as a commercial fisherman is a profession, but also a kind of addiction. All of it—the wind across the deck; the solitude of being out at a spot like Jeffreys Ledge in the Gulf of Maine; settled behind the wheel with a pair of Rottweilers named Reba and Ripple lounging at his heels, scanning the sonar screen—for a guy who grew up in the fishing community of Broad Channel, New York, it doesn’t get any better than this. click here to read the story 15:38
