For the first time in approximately six decades, a crew of fishermen have hauled an Atlantic bluefin tuna off the Yorkshire coastline.
A five-member crew aboard The Dominator hauled in a massive 338kg fish on Sunday, roughly 10 miles from Whitby Harbour.
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The species had vanished from the North Sea since the 1960s, driven away by overfishing and the collapse of herring populations.
Jack Gardner, a 28-year-old crew member from the village of Paull, near Hull, said: “I have never caught anything like it,” calling it the “best feeling ever”, having served on The Dominator since 2018.
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University of Exeter researchers, who have since tagged six bluefin tuna in the waters off Whitby, confirmed the catch marks a historic landmark for the region.
The crew had ventured to waters where the migratory fish were rumoured to be present, investigating a cluster of birds above the water before heading back to port.
Mr Gardner said: “We couldn’t believe that we had actually hooked into one. We knew they were in the waters, it was just whether we could catch them or not because they are fast fish.”
After hooking the tuna, the team towed it for roughly five miles before managing to bring it on board.
“The fight was a lot harder than I thought, the power of it,” the crew member recalled.
The fish had already been sold before The Dominator returned to Whitby – repeating their success the following day by landing another bluefin tuna weighing in excess of 300kg.
Lance Varrell, the buyer from Hook to Plate, described the fish as “good quality”, and said they would be distributed to restaurants, sushi markets and specialist customers.
“Bluefin tuna is very popular. It’s a very premium fish – they call it the Rolls Royce of the sea,” he said, noting that Japanese chefs in London would pay up to £100 per kilogram for top-grade catches.
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A 210kg bluefin caught off the south-west coast last year fetched more than £2,000 at auction.
Yorkshire’s connection to bluefin tuna stretches back to the interwar years, when Scarborough and Whitby gained international renown as game fishing destinations.
The British record – a 386kg fish – was set at Whitby in 1933, and Hollywood stars including John Wayne and Errol Flynn visited the Scarborough Tunny Club, established in the 1930s and now operating as a fish and chip shop.
Fishing declined during the Second World War, and advancing commercial technology saw tuna stocks dwindle through the 1950s.
A University of Exeter spokesman noted the fresh tuna caught by the crew this week were “considerably larger and may be genetically distinct from those already tagged.”
Since 2018, the research team has fitted tags to 165 bluefin tuna along the Atlantic coast of England, Wales and Jersey.
Dr Lucy Hawkes, who leads the tagging programme, credited “some careful and judicious management of fisheries” for the species’ reappearance in British waters, adding that the UK’s fishing quota for bluefin remains “really small” relative to overall stock levels.
“Essentially their presence is a good way of signalling your waters are doing well, but we have no idea where they’ve come from which is why tagging is so important,” she added.
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