In the winter of 1978, Joe Malley fell in love—with commercial fishing. What started as a weekend trip fishing with friends in Alaska changed the entire trajectory of Joe's life: he dropped out of his PhD program at the University of Oregon, sold all his belongings, and bought a boat and a permit. Academia's loss was Seattle's gain; since that fateful weekend, Joe and his wife, Joyce, have supplied restaurants, stores, and families around the region with high-quality seafood. These days, the Malleys specialize in albacore. The St. Jude, a 95-foot troller based in Seattle, Wash., fishes 12 months a year, following Albacore tuna from the North Pacific in summer to the South Pacific in fall.
Sustainable catch
Unlike longlining and trawling, which can result in considerable bycatch, trolling for albacore is much more precise—and thus much less likely to harm animals such as sharks, dolphins, sea turtles, seabirds, and rays. Instead, albacore are individually caught on hooks and lures dragged behind the St. Jude. When the young fish, which live in the warmer waters near the surface of the ocean, come in for a nibble, the crew reels them in by hand.
"In my personal experience in thousands of hours trolling, we never had a marine mammal encounter, we never killed a shark. We once gave a thrill ride to a three-pound green turtle when he got tangled up with a jig line, but he was released uninjured after we took a few pictures," says Joe. "We do occasionally hook seabirds. The birds are very light, and they are easy to retrieve to the boat. We release them immediately and generally they show no ill effects."
"I would estimate that our catch of other species while trolling for albacore averages about two fish per thousand albacore caught," Joe continues. "None of the fish we catch is wasted, most provide a welcome change of diet to the crew."
This careful approach to fishing earned St. Jude canned albacore an endorsement from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program—something we look for in our seafood partners.
A difference you can taste
Think back to the canned tuna of your youth. Can you picture it, taste it, in your memory? What comes to mind is probably pale pink, dry, and so lacking in flavor, it could just as easily have been canned salmon or chicken. Not so with St. Jude's, which is meaty, flavorful, and tastes like, well, tuna.
From where they fish to the type of tuna they catch to how they handle and process each fish, care is built into every step of St. Jude's process.
Each albacore is landed and handled individually on a cushioned platform to prevent bruising, and its time on deck is controlled. The fish are rinsed, processed, and frozen right on board. Back at the cannery, the albacore are slowly thawed in the open air, which takes about 16 hours.
Next, the fish are filleted, and anything bruised, discolored, or bloody is discarded. Then the fillets are cut into steaks, the steaks are then put into cans, weights checked (pieces Tetris-ed into place to get things just right, if necessary), and the cans sealed. Only then is the raw fish cooked, using a retort, or pressure canner. This process, called cold-packed canning, is substantially different than the hot-packed canning methods used by large-scale tuna operations, where the fish is pre-cooked before canning.
End to end, the process is slow going, but the difference in quality is well worth the wait.