Harpoon Hunters
Doug Lindley, one of only a handful of remaining bluefin tuna spotter pilots, is featured in the Discovery Channel series Harpoon Hunters.
Written by Brian Bushard
Photography by Kit Noble
Doug Lindley is one of a dying breed of pilots. Fifty miles northeast of Nantucket, Lindley spots what appears to be a disturbance in the water. Sitting some 800 feet overhead in his 1968 Piper PA-18 SuperCub single-propeller plane known as 44 Zulu, Lindley is looking at what could be a whale, a flock of gulls, a school of baitfish or, possibly, the wake from a school of coveted bluefin tuna.
Lindley signals to his captain, Mattapoisett Select Board member and 40-year harpoon fisherman Tyler Macallister, to go in for the strike as swiftly as possible. Too slow, and they’ll miss the fish. Too fast, and the tuna will be spooked into deeper waters where they’re harder to spot. Lindley and Macallister are part of a dwindling group of fishermen carrying on the tradition of harpoon tuna fishing, a method that’s earned a reputation as one of the most challenging—and also one of the cleanest—ways to catch a fish. They are also stars of the Discovery Channel’s new series Harpoon Hunters.
“There’s probably six of us left,” Lindley said about harpoon tuna fishing spotter pilots. “There usedto be 30 or 40 of us when it was really worthwhile, and most of them were swordfish guys. It’s become kind of a lost art.”
Harpoon tuna fishing works when everything goes right. The bluefin season only lasts a matter of weeks in the summer, so anyone involved needs to make the most of it. With the legal limit set at five fish per day, captains best be sure they catch enough to afford the immense cost of a boat, a crew, repairs and fuel to take them into the channels where bluefin hunt for food. With so much on the line—and with bluefins that fetch prices upward of $10,000—most captains hire spotters.
“The plane is an extension of the boat,” said Macallister, captain of the Cynthia C.2 harpooning vessel that partners with Lindley. “You have an 800-foot tower that can move at70 knots and cover the ocean. Doug can see the fish deeper in the water column than I can. Once he sees them, he can hold them and keep an eye on them until they come back up.”
Lindley has always looked to the skies. His father was a World War II fighter pilot in the South Pacific. Lindley has also been fishing for decades. He was a professional sportfishing boat captain for 30 years, but at some point along the way, he realized he was more interested in a bird’s-eye view of the ocean than the view from the captain’s seat. Years earlier, one of Lindley’s friends teased the idea of going out for a pilot’s license, even saying he would pay for it. That was 1980. The friend lost interest, but Lindley stuck with it, even when it meant six-plus hours looking for signs of fish.
“You’re looking for birds and whales and big schools of bait, and the tuna fish you can see on the surface,” he said. “You see huge schools of them, they make a tremendous wake. From the plane on a calm day you can see them from miles away if it’s a big school. We call it nervous water, when they’re upsetting the water like that."
Harpoon Hunters debuted on the Discovery Channel in January. To film the show, producers attached four cameras to Lindley’s plane, which he keeps at a hangar at Nantucket Memorial Airport. Once the bluefins are spotted and the boats close in, the show’s producers launch drones to capture the catch. The show focuses as much on the tradition of the industry as it does on the rivalries and infighting that ostensibly divide its members, though Lindley said the real story is a bit different. Still, he understands the need for dramatics.
“We all work together, and for the most part we’re all good friends and help each other out,” he said. “We’ll travel out together in case someone gets in trouble.”
The Discovery Channel was looking for a follow-up to Deadliest Catch, its 20-season Alaskan crab fishing series that became so popular it even survived the collapse of the crab population in the waters where it was filmed. Discovery also happens to be vying for an audience during a proliferation of dating shows that pit strangers against each other, hence the dramatics.
The first episode of Harpoon Hunters landed 670,000 viewers, Lindley said, outpacing Discovery’s goal of 500,000.With that kind of audience, Lindley hopes the show will give viewers insight into the abundance of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic, something that has not always been the case. He has seen the rise and fall—and now the resurgence—of bluefin tuna numbers first-hand. According to the World Wildlife Fund, bluefin populations in the Atlantic and Pacific have dwindled severely due to overfishing, though regulations like the five-fish per day limit have been put in place with the intention of preserving the fishery.
“I got to see the heyday and I saw the decline,” he said. “Everybody cried about the regulations, but it’s one of the few fisheries where the regulations have worked the way they wanted it to."
Lindley has also seen the cost of doing business rise as the fishery has waned. If he doesn’t make $600 per day—the cost of flying his plane around Nantucket and the Cape—he said it’s not worth it. While his crews have had $20,000days in the past, Lindley has also gone as long as 17 days without a catch, leaving him counting on a few incredible days to recoup his losses.
“It used to be that you could walk on them,” he said. “In the late ’70s, early ’80s, they started to become worth more money. The Japanese market developed. Before that, it was sold for cat food, but then the Japanese market developed and it became a delicacy over there. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon. There was a lot of money in it and they were overfished. In recent years with the regulations and putting limitations on them and so on, the fish have come back huge."
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