Bali - Tuna fishing

Five local Balinese wooden longline vessels enter Benoa harbour within the space of two hours. They have been fishing for yellowfin and bigeye tuna in the Indian Ocean for the past week and will offload today to a simple processing facility beside the quay, for export overnight to Tokyo, Japan.

On any night of the year there is so much longline laid out by the world’s tuna fishing fleets that it circumvents the world five times – that’s 200,000 km of longline. The last batch of fish from the latest vessel to unload this day comes ashore at 17.45. Each fish is inspected for freshness and toro (fat) content. Fish are rejected or approved at this stage, if rejected they goes to the restaurants in Bali and if approved they will be sent by plane to Tokyo tonight. Each fish which is approved is weighed and packed into standard-sized cardboard “coffins”.  These are then transferred to a waiting refrigerated truck, which shortly after is speeding on its way to Ngurah Rai international airport where its cargo is set for loading onto the 00.35 Garuda flight to Tokyo, arriving in Narita at 08.45 the following morning.

The crew are nearing the end of their two rest days and are preparing to head out early morning to search for and land fresh sashimi-quality tuna again in about seven to 10 days’ time. There are over 850 such tuna longline vessels based at Benoa.
This is the height of the Southern Bluefin tuna breeding season with their spawning grounds located to the South of Java. Though these fish range between the southern half of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, this is their only known breeding ground.

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