Word: heitz
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...Heitz, a blond Illinoisan who sports a fading Maui & Sons T-shirt and a tuna tattoo on his bicep, is an out-and-out tuna man. That's why he lives and works in General Santos City in the southern Philippines, one of the planet's great tuna-fishing ports. By 6 a.m. on an August morning, the heat at the docks - a raucous, clanging, blood-and-guts tangle of 10,000 buyers, sellers, porters and men whacking rusty knives into silver skin - is unforgiving. Boat crews crouch in patches of shade on deck, smoking and waiting for their wages...
...quality hauls of yellowfin that has come in all week. Heitz jumps into the scrum of insults and jokes flying between the buyers and the sellers. Quality testers sink metal rods into the fish, pulling out samples of pink meat that they rub between their thumb and forefinger and smell. The biggest and best tuna will go for about $700 wholesale, and get whisked away to be washed, beheaded, gutted and packed with dry ice to catch the 10:30 a.m. flight to Manila. By the next day, the fish will be in Tokyo, Seattle or California. By the next...
...That's bad news not just for the oceans, but also for John Heitz and millions of others who make a living from these fish. General Santos earned its motto as the "Tuna Capital of the Philippines" when fishermen could go out in the morning and return at dusk with two or three 150-lb. (70 kg) yellowfin or bigeye, two tuna species that, like the bluefin, are sold for sashimi. Now, even the smallest of those tuna are at least a two- or three-day trip out to sea. These waters, like so many others, have been fished...
...General Santos and ports like it, when the fish start to go, everyone loses: the boat owners, the cannery workers, the exporters, the porters, the truck drivers. As the day winds down at the port, John Heitz walks between rows of small, unsold yellowfin that look, and smell, like they have seen better days. After the good ones go early in the morning, thousands of fish like these are left over, caught too young to have been given a chance to spawn and too far away to get back to dock in time to sell for a good price...
...General Santos, people do respect the tuna. John Heitz points to a few men hauling yellowfin through the water from small wooden boats. "This is one of the few handline fisheries in the world," Heitz says. It's not flashy, but it follows the rules, pays the bills and, over time, it will keep these great animals in the water. "By eating a certain product, you're part of the problem, or part of the solution." Heitz wants to be on the solution side. Once, when he was scuba-diving off General Santos' coast, two yellowfin torpedoed past...