Word: swordfishing
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...died quietly, and I watched (with some, but not enough, regret) its gleaming gun-metal skin fade swiftly to death's dull gray. It wasn't a particularly big swordfish; it weighed only 247 lbs. A big swordfish would weigh more than half...
...been able to know back then that what I had just caught was one of the last stragglers of a vanishing species--that within 35 years a 247-lb. Atlantic broadbill swordfish would be as rare as a tyrannosaur--I would have set it free, administered CPR or, if all attempts at resuscitation had failed, I would at least have had the carcass of the mighty fish gilded and sent to the Smithsonian...
Today the average Atlantic swordfish caught weighs 90 lbs., and the figure drops by a pound or two every year. Because swordfish don't breed until the female is five years old and weighs 150 lbs., we're killing and eating the teenagers before they can reproduce. And though the U.S. is trying, at last, to lead a campaign to stop the slaughter, the effort is too little, too late. Swordfish, like tuna and the other pelagic (open-ocean) fish, roam far from American jurisdiction. There have been reliable reports of commercial fishermen in the Mediterranean routinely landing swordfish weighing...
...Granted, swordfish are an especially vulnerable target, being prized as both game fish and food fish. But they're hardly the only victims of the current global lunacy, of which the motto seems to be: if it swims, hook it, stab it, poison it or blow...
...often wish that back in the halcyon '60s, I had had the wit to release my swordfish. Its kind will not come our way again...