FISHERIES: Fugitive Albacore

Fortnight ago the Columbia River Packers Association motor ship Unga put out from Astoria, Ore. to look for albacore tuna. Next day, 40 miles out into the Pacific from Oregon’s Cascade Head, the Unga sighted the year’s first tuna, touched off a new season for one of Oregon’s newest industries.

The tuna were running strong. First day’s catch of eleven tons brought a posted price of $125 a ton. With clear skies, ideal fishing conditions, the first week’s catch totaled 200 tons—twice what it was last season. Last week it was grinding through the tuna canneries.

Though the tuna were running two weeks earlier than ever before, fishers and packers were thankful that they were running at all. For the albacore, which is the U. S.’s finest eating tuna, is a wayward fish. Sometimes mistaken for a porpoise, he was until a few years ago the prize of the California fishers’ catch. Then he disappeared from those waters.” In 1935 famed stubble-headed Oceanographer Dr. Thomas Gordon Thompson, aboard his floating laboratory Catalyst, spied schools of albacore in the warm, blue waters of the Japanese Current 100 miles off the Oregon-Washington coast. He told Seattle fisherfolk of his find, and by 1937, 100 to 150 boats were at work in the new gold mine. Last year Oregon and Washington tuna-men hooked 8,887,575 lb.—over four times the California catch.

Many a theory was hatched to explain the albacore’s strange migration. Theory or no theory, California fishermen were deserted by the white-meat albacore, left .with the less tasty, dark-meat yellowfin tuna.

Though tuna may migrate without notice, packers cannot. Biggest Northern States packer is Astoria’s William Leonard Thompson (no kin to the oceanographer), board chairman of C. R. P. A. But C. R. P. A. was famed for its salmon pack—Bristol Bay’s Alaska Red, Columbia River’s Fancy Chinook. So when the first albacore came to him in 1937, big, whispering, hard-hitting Bill Thompson, 60, sent them to California for processing and packing. California packers condemned twelve carloads. Roaring “To hell with that—we’ll can ’em ourselves,” Bill Thompson and his fellow Astorians put in $500,000 worth of new tuna-canning equipment.

Californians fought to keep control of the pack. Last year fishermen enjoyed a North-South price war, which hoisted prices from $90 to as high as $150 a ton for their catch. Oregon finally topped California by a standing offer of $2.50 more than any price California wanted to name. (Apparently chastened, neither side has moved to start a new war this season.) California packers next carried the fight to Washington, asked the Federal Trade Commission for permission to label their tuna extra fancy. Thompson and his friends, new hosts to the albacore, claimed that only their tuna merited such a term. Result: no tuna can now be labeled extra fancy; only albacore can be labeled white meat.

With more ample tuna facilities, California far out-packed the northerners last year—3,200,000 cases of tuna (all kinds) to Oregon-Washington’s 170,000. Last year C. R. P. A., controlled by Big Bill and his son Edward, netted $149,491 on sales of $4,749,322. Aim of the Thompsons, who pack half the salmon taken from the Columbia, is to do the same for their State’s new tuna industry—if the flighty tuna will stay put long enough to let their canneries expand.