Atlantic bluefin tuna have been caught off the coast of Yorkshire for the first time in an estimated 60 years.
The giant fish had not been seen in the North Sea since the 1960s due to overfishing and the depletion of herring shoals, according to researchers from the University of Exeter who have now tagged six off Whitby.
On Sunday, the five-person crew on board The Dominator landed a whopping 338kg specimen before repeating the feat a day later with a fish which weighed “just a little bit” less, according to crew member Jack Gardner.
“I have never caught anything like it,” said the 28-year-old from the village of Paull, near Hull, calling it the “best feeling ever”.
Gardner, who has been on board The Dominator since 2018, said the crew had been about 10 miles from Whitby Harbour on Sunday when they made their first catch.
“It jumped out of the water, we all just looked at each other in awe,” he said.
“We couldn’t believe that we had actually hooked into one.”
The crew had travelled to an area where they had heard the migratory species had been.
“Just as we were heading home we spotted a group of birds, so we went to try and have a look around there and that’s when we hooked into one,” said Gardner.
“We knew they were in the waters, it was just whether we could catch them or not because they are fast fish.”
Last year a 210kg bluefin tuna caught in South West waters fetched more than £2,000 at auction.
Gardner said the rare catch for his crew had already sold before the boat had arrived back in Whitby.
The following day they caught another bluefin tuna which also weighed more than 300kg.
The buyer, Lance Varrell from Hook to Plate, said the fish were “good quality” and would be sold on to restaurants, sushi markets and directly to customers.
“Bluefin tuna is very popular. It’s a very premium fish – they call it the Rolls Royce of the sea,” he added.
Itamaes (Japanese chefs) based in London would pay as much as £100 per kilo “if it’s really good”, he added.
Gardner said he was “immensely proud” of his crewmates Ben Shutt, Liam Crosby and their apprentice Ada, as well as skipper Clive Easton, for their role in the historic – and fruitful – catch.
In the interwar period, Scarborough and Whitby became world-famous destinations for game fishing because of the size of the tuna – nicknamed “tunny”. The British record was set in Whitby by a 386kg specimen in 1933.
Celebrities of the day such as John Wayne and Errol Flynn even travelled to the area to partake in the pursuit.
They and other actors and aristocrats were visitors to the Scarborough Tunny Club, founded in the 1930s and which survives today as a fish and chip restaurant.
The pastime suffered during World War Two and although the sport resumed, by the 1950s stocks of tuna were on the wane as commercial fishing technology developed.
Bluefin tuna have also returned to the South West coast in recent years after decades of absence.
Since 2018, researchers from the University of Exeter have tagged 165 bluefin tuna from the Atlantic coast of England, Wales and Jersey.
A spokesperson said the fish found off the Whitby coast were “considerably larger and may be genetically distinct from those already tagged”.
Dr Lucy Hawkes, who is leading the research, attributed the return of bluefin tuna to British waters to “some careful and judicious management of fisheries” and said the UK’s current quota for fishing the species was “really small” compared to overall levels of its stock.
“Bluefin tuna are also top predators who can only be in these waters if the ecosystems underneath them are healthy,” she added.
“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.
“We are just going to be following the fish day by day, so we just need to see what they do over the next year or two of their lives to figure out who the heck they are and where they come from.”
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Project to identify what bluefin tuna feed on