There’s something in the water, and it’s enormous bluefin tuna. A second trophy bluefin tuna was caught off the coast of Point Pleasant just one week after a mammoth-sized, 718-pound bluefin was hooked in the same area.
But the one snared on April 27 is bigger.
At 772 pounds, the fish Jim Peters and his crew reeled in is about 50 pounds heavier than the one Kevin Goldberg and his mate Mike Resetar boated just seven days before.
Peters said his tuna measured out at the same length as Goldberg’s at 112 inches and took the same amount of time to wrestle into the boat.
“I was just hoping for a connection,” Peters said Monday. “I wasn’t expecting this.”
Between Goldberg and Peters’ two tunas, they accounted for about one-fifth of the Southern New England region’s 2.3 metric ton quota for trophy bluefin set by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA regulates tuna and other migratory fisheries. The 2024 trophy season off the New Jersey coast closed on Thursday, with reported landings having reached or exceeded the NOAA-prescribed quota.
New Jersey spans two separate NOAA regions, with the southern region running from Great Egg inlet just south of Atlantic City down to the Gulf of Mexico and the northern shores of the Jersey coast falling under the southern New England region, which travels up to the edge of Cape Cod.
Bluefins of this size are not necessarily rare off the coast of New Jersey, either. The state record for a bluefin caught off the Jersey coast is just over 1,030 pounds by Royal Parsons in 1981. And guess what? That fish was caught off Point Pleasant, too.
“While bluefin tuna of this size are always impressive, they are not exceptionally large for the New Jersey area,” spokesperson for the Atlantic Highly Migratory Species division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Andrea Gomez said Tuesday. “Historically, it is generally unusual to see this many trophy bluefin tuna caught in the Mid-Atlantic this early in the year, but it is not unprecedented.
Gomez explained that last year, trophy-size tuna didn’t start appearing at docks along the Jersey Shore until mid-May.
“This year, landings began almost a month earlier. We have seen a great deal of fishing activity in this subregion in the last few days and are monitoring the quota closely,” Gomez said earlier this week.
Just off the coast of Point Pleasant is a popular fishing location called the Mud Hole, which was naturally created by currents funneling from the mouth of the Hudson River and out to the intercontinental shelf.
Saturday was Peters’ maiden voyage of the season, hoping to catch a migrating school of tuna heading up the coast from North Carolina, he said. His boat, Reel Time, and his crew launched out of Raritan Bay, curled around Sandy Hook and steamed all the way down to Seaside.
This is where Peters and his crew — Mariusz Zach, Michal Kubisiak, Jordan Cook and Randy Ciprich — baited the lines with ballyhoo and started trolling north about seven miles off the coast.
Like Goldberg’s fish the week before, Peters and his crew fought the tuna for four hours, but this one took Peters’ boat five miles further offshore. He said the fish hit the line at about 1 p.m. and they didn’t get it to the boat until 5 p.m.
“I had plans that night and this fish interrupted those plans,” he said. “It took us an hour just to get the fish on the boat and I had to unhinge the tuna door to get it through.”
Once the tuna was on the boat though, finding a marina still open to winch up the fish was a little tricky.
“I tried calling everywhere to bring the fish in but it seemed like everyone closed up for the night and were gone,” said Peters. “Brielle Yacht Club was willing to hang around and let us dock to bring the fish in.”
Brielle Yacht Club didn’t return calls for comment.
Like Goldberg, Peters could not sell the fish, so he enjoyed some sushi with friends, dockside, before packing up the rest of the meat for himself and his crew.
“It was the fish of a lifetime,” he said.
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Matthew Enuco may be reached at Menuco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow Matt on X.
