It is not every day that you have three hooks on the hook in time. Especially not when each fish weighs around 250 pounds.
Less than 10 minutes ago
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It was Friday! Because in the boat there was already an uncluttered sturgeon weighing 320 kilos. The boys were on a fishing trip at Stadhavet, an hour and a half boat trip west of Ålesund, when fishing luck broke all records last Friday.
– It was completely absurd. When one of the lake’s hardest fish to catch hits, it’s an absolutely amazing experience. The mackerel sturgeon is by far one of the strongest fish in the world, if not the strongest the stronger, says Thomas Tangen Flem, who was traveling.
– The fish went all over the place
He says they spent about an hour securing the catch.
– We had to move the bars; the fish went all over the place and crossed the lines, so we had to catch one fish at a time.
Stein Magne Hoff (65), skipper and owner of the MS Tare boat, says he pulled out five fishing rods when they landed in the middle of a school of mackerel sturgeon. Parallel to the fishing boat was a boat with marine scientists.
– All the fish collected in the wake of our boat. There were hundreds of fish and full attachment to our hooks which are equipped with rubber squid. She boiled. We have fish on all rods, five at a time. Two fled and three were saved. Alone the it’s a milestone, says the skipper.
Hoff previously worked as a nature management, fishing and trapping teacher at Ålesund High School and says the mackerel sturgeon almost disappeared from Norwegian waters due to overfishing in the 1970s.
– But then it suddenly appeared again five or six years ago. Then people caught the sturgeon when they caught mackerel, and it has grown more and more since then, says Hoff, who explains that commercial inshore mackerel fishing opened this year.
For the past two years he has been involved in a project under the auspices of the Norwegian Marine Research Institute where they branded the mackerel sturgeon and released it again. But it is now ready for commercial fishing. Hoff hopes he can breathe new life into coastal fishermen.
– What do you do when you catch fish?
– The usual procedure is to keep it hanging behind the boat for a while. Mackerel sturgeon produces a lot of lactic acid so that it gets hot in the fish, it can almost boil and then it is destroyed. Therefore, it is taken to the boat where it can enter the hook while being secured with a rope so that it empties of lactic acid. Then we welcome it, cut the gills and let it hang for a while behind the boat and bleed it before taking it aboard, slaughtering the fish and cleaning it, explains Hoff.
Afterwards, it is placed on hundreds of kilos of ice and then the ship heads to the harbor. The fish meat is then sent out into the world.
Praise the fishermen
Mackerel sturgeon, called Atlantic bluefin tuna in English, is sought after.
– What we delivered over the weekend went to Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, says Hoff, who says he was well paid for the fish. The price varies between NOK 25,000 and NOK 60,000 per fish, depending on the quality, season and size.
– But fishing gear and fuel cost a fortune, says the retired teacher who was out with several of his alumni when the fishing fortune came to their aid.
– They are passionate, they are hunters and it is largely thanks to them that there has been a good catch.
Keno Ferter, a researcher at the Norwegian Marine Research Institute, says he has a project in which they study the migration and behavior of the mackerel sturgeon that stays along the Norwegian coast and where it takes its route.
– It is marked with satellite tags that record depth, temperature and light. They sit on the mackerel sturgeon for a year. After a year, they detach from the fish and float to the surface and then send data via satellite. That way you can calculate the most likely walking route, Ferter says and adds that GPS doesn’t work underwater.
He says it in the fish that followed swam over 15,000 km in one year. From Norway she swam north of Shetlands, crossed the Atlantic before turning back and visited the Mediterranean before finally swimming north and returning to Norway in August.
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