Sorry, Charlie

My wife asked me last week how big tuna get, having the impression that they were only a foot long or so. Here's a timely local story that gives you an idea of the actual size of these underwater behemoths. This thing would make a lot of cats happy.


So you catch a trophy of a fish, get lots of publicity, and then what?

A power saw is involved. "And monster knives," says Dan, 39, who watched on the dock last Saturday while three men took three hours to butcher the massive fish. When the job was done, there was more than 500 pounds -- dozens of huge plastic bags of tuna, cut into steaks the size of dinner plates.

Giant bluefin tuna, whose fatty bellies are prized for buttery toro sushi, are the Powerballs of commercial fishing. They can fetch a fisherman $6 to $20 a pound. Because the tuna is the most muscular fish in the water, with a small body cavity, 80 percent of it is edible. If the Dillons could have flown that baby straight to Japan, where the fish is most prized, they might have netted $12,800. But the charter boat captain who took Dillon and three friends out to fish for shark doesn't have a federal permit to sell bluefin, nor do most charter operators in the mid-Atlantic.

Since Dillon couldn't sell it, he would have to eat it.

"It's pretty amazing when you think about the challenge of getting rid of all that fish," says Dan.