Swimming with Tuna: Human-Ocean Entanglements

Abstract

We're on a pontoon somewhere in the middle of Boston Bay, at the bottom of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia-the birthplace of tuna ranching.The fairly short ride over in the Adventure Tour boat was enough to churn my stomach, and the sideways swaying of the pontoon isn't helping my general queasiness.I can handle anything if I am in water.One of my favourite pastimes is to swim straight out into the middle of the ocean, but this has been curtailed by being in South Australia, home of the great white pointer shark and assorted cousins.I tend to swim on the water rather than in water.Analogous to a critique levelled by Aboriginal people about how whites walk through country rather in it, I have too often floated above the densely populated world of the sea.It's a onesided view of the world that we need to re-address if we are to do justice to the immensity of human-ocean entanglements.Steve, our handsome tour guide, has given us all sorts of information gathered over some 20 years of his life as a prawn trawler man, deep sea fisherman, and now occasional guide on his mate, Matt Waller's tour boat.Matt got out of fishing to set up Adventure Tours, a fully eco-offset enterprise, which takes tourists from around the world to see at first hand tuna, and sea lions.He recently has added swimming with great white sharks-which is beyond me.Matt is cleareyed about the difficulties facing the fishing industry, which includes the fierce and ultimately ecologically untenable competition for dwindling world-wide stocks, and long and dangerous work for a family man.But he also remembers vividly what he calls the 'high of fishing'.Those were the days when the fish were easy and Port Lincoln would be full of young hard working guys with lots of money ready to party.Money doesn't flow as easily these days, and the town is besieged with worries about the future of the fisheries and of fishing itself.Matt himself is in a fierce price war with another outfit that coined the name, 'Swim-with-the-tuna', some years after Matt had initiated the idea.Such are the emotions that normally voluble fishers around town go quiet when I mention the feud.Out at sea our boat pulls up next to a floating enclosure-heavily protected against the pirates who will steal the fish if they can.We've also reached the pinnacle of our tuna tour and here we are with a pen of some 300 juvenile Southern Bluefin tuna.The idea is now to jump in with them-as they speed for pilchards.Apparently they can go from 0 to 70 km faster than a Porsche and

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