Well, the 2010 tuna is really starting to run low, so I was eagerly anticipating tuna season this year. We are still figuring out the whole tuna finding thing on the boat (honestly, I wouldn’t mind going on a charter again — big time tuna finding, price is probably about the same as taking our boat out a couple times.. never mind). Anyway, we ended up finding a couple tuna on the second day out, at least I’ve caught a tuna on our boat now!
The fishing was as fun as I remember — I think that if I had to only fish for one species for the rest of my life, I’d pick tuna. They just fight really hard and are really pretty when they come out of the water. And there’s no limit (and thus no artificial “you can only fish here” or “you can only catch this type or this size” — that stuff really bugs me).
They are also very, very tasty.
Our two fish were about 20# each, which ended up producing ~20# of meat. I brought the fillets home to Hilltop, and we spent the evening canning.
We decided to try out a couple of new recipes; along with the old standard salt and garlic clove, we tried putting salt/jalapeno/garlic in some (we tried a lot more jalapeno this time, since last time we didn’t get a whole lot of peppery flavor). We also tried salt/ranch dressing mix in a few (half the salt in these, since the dressing mix has sodium in it and we didn’t want to over-salt).
Last time, we’d done all pints. This time, because we were mixing up the recipes a little (and because we’d inherited some interesting wide-mouth half-pint jars), we decided to do a lot more half pint jars. It took a canner and a half. I inherited a canner (with a fine provenance — it belonged to Tuna Dave), so we were able to do it all in one batch.
We ended up with 28 half-pints and 6 pints. 2 tuna, 20# of meat, 20 pints. Hey, that’s not a bad rule of thumb.
The house smells like fish, but we have a bunch of tuna in the pantry! Might even make it to 2013 tuna season.