My mates father recalls also they used to catch these football tunas that looked like blackfin tuna or baby bluefin..Who knows what lost shoals or stocks were around... Around the same time the SBF started disappearing from false bay, their stock was being hammered or the java sea where they spawn by the Aussies and Japs and others. I had commercial mates last season one day got stuck into the adult SBF, they were catching longies then suddenly the longies disappeared and then the deep line went off, and then the others, biggest they got was just shy of 150 kg I think, they had 3 on at once at one stage in that fight..
As well I can't recall of it was those mates or others, or if there were two reports, of guys last season that got stuck into a massive shoal of unknown smaller tunas that could only really be juvenile SBF, which then leads one to ask what the hell they were doing there on South West coast africa if the only known spawn ground is halfway around the world in the Java Sea and there are no currents that will deliver them there. My guess is that a stock of large adults made its way to the cape to fatten up as they traditionally used to, now that there are large adults in the oceans again with the stock slowly rebounding over the last 20 years, and when it came time to spawn they followed the leader as fish do in a shoal, and hit africas west coast and went north as they normally would in Auz, and they found a bay that was suitable and spawned as they normally would. Maybe there used to be sort of eastern and western stocks that overlapped or were common stocks, like it is with the Thunnus Thunnus up north? Maybe just maybe that was what went down in the old days with those rugby ball tunas that would get caught in false bay and the large adults off Fish Hoek, was that the stock was in such good shape that with basin effect, that out here and at Chile there would still be good numbers with the basin overflowing. So now with the basin filling once again with fish, some might have decided things are crowded and stayed to make a new coast their permanent home. On the otherhand we will never know, maybe the small fish were a lost stock of blackfin made its way over form Brazil?
We've seen that in the last couple of years with yellowtail, patterns change all the time, that as the stock is slowly rebounding and the numbers improving up the east coast of the adult fish because of increased numbers of younguns, we've seen that separate stocks of malkoppie size fish, not yet of spawn size, that are not bothering to move further south to the Agulhas banks or to and around cape point to the west coast to ysterfontein which would be their traditional area to grow up but rather have been trying to hold on structure in the east coast bays.. Also there seems to be a class fish missing that coincides with the thousands of tons of babies removed by trekkers in the height of the elnino 4-2 years ago. Maybe, but probably not, they got tired of being trekked in cape town or being caught by the hundreds of tons off the southern cape banks, but who knows..but what we have noticed is each winter a massive stock of smaller/younger than normal for the area, fish are staying behind in the east coast bays all the way up the transkei, and remaining there through the summer and winter, and that never traditionally happened according to the old timers. Normally would just be the large tail in those waters in summer resident with malkoppies coming past beginning and end season, but far less of them than in Cape town and west coast etc..We've had 3 years almost of a same stock of tail just parking off on a set of reefs for the whole year..now catching the same fish as adults 10kg plus 3 years later..all shoaling with a new stock/wave of babies everyyear that dont seem to have any inclination to move further south with the current as they normally would..Normally in winter only strandlopers, large lone fish stay behind and rest goes north to spawn, but last few years massive shoals of 2-4 kg fish are moving in and holding and not going anywhere for months at a time..
Point is none of this is set in stone..fish would be everywhere in the ocean if it was not for currents and oceans of unfavorable waters cutting them off..Leervis are comfortable in waters just a degree or two above tail and that allowed them to occur in the Med all the way down the west african coast to here, with a small band of no occurrence in the tropical west coast of Africa, where they must have made it across at some point to get here, or get to the Med, blacktail occur from here to there but yellowtail never made it across the tropical band of water at the equator to get to the med..The Med full of tail would be something even more epic than it is!
Anyway back to Bluefin..We will never know what went down in the past with the stocks and their disappearance, completely, but who knows what will happen in the future..I am holding thumbs!!