It’s a Monday afternoon and Fishermen’s Terminal in Ballard is relatively empty. A man pulls into the parking lot in a minivan and snakes his way over speed bumps to the water’s edge, where he stops alongside a battered-looking boat. After hopping onto the deck and exchanging a few words and some cash with the boat’s all-Fijian crew, he gingerly packs a whole flash-frozen albacore tuna into a Styrofoam container, places it in his trunk, and glides away.

The transaction has the air of a secret. But it isn’t one. The St. Jude has been trolling for albacore in the Pacific for 35 years, and its owners, Joe and Joyce Malley, have been selling their catch off the boat intermittently since 1999. When you think of classic Seattle seafood, your mind doesn’t necessarily go to tuna. But the story of the St. Jude is one of how Seattle is connected to fisheries from Alaska to the South Pacific, and how those fisheries have evolved over half a century.

In 1978, Joe Malley was a PhD student in math at the University of Oregon when he was invited to spend a few days fishing salmon in Alaska over winter break. By the time he got back, his academic career was over. “I hocked everything I owned, borrowed all the money I could, and bought a boat and permit, literally never having driven a boat that didn't have an outboard on the back,” Malley says.

For the next 15 years, Malley fished salmon, halibut, and black cod. But he found himself constantly frustrated by the shifting politics of regulatory agencies, by the dangers of single-day season openings, in which boats had a short window to produce their annual catch of a fish, regardless of weather conditions, and by the industry’s constant struggles to sustain itself without destroying the biomass it depended on.

Albacore trolling, on the other hand, is a “graceful fishery.” When you longline at the seafloor, or trawl with a net, you end up with a lot of superfluous bycatch. Not so with the young albacore the St. Jude is after, who live near the surface in a very specific temperature belt of 58- to 68-degree water “It’s like sport fishing,” says Malley. “Basically, you’re driving around with lures on the surface, and the fish come up and grab a lure and you pull them in by hand and bleed them and brainstem them.”

The individual albacore—each between two and three feet long—are then handed down to the ship’s onboard freezer hold, where they remain for the duration of the trip. There’s an element of art to the whole process. An albacore must be handled with great care before it is frozen, otherwise you risk bruising it.

A single tuna trip can take the St. Jude anywhere from off the coast of Washington and British Columbia to Japan to the South Pacific, for up to three months at a time. It’s not for everybody. And, increasingly, Malley has found that Americans are not cut out for the long trips—even though the work is lucrative. “They want to step on the boat, make a lot of money, wash the boat, walk away, and go buy a Camaro.”

Which is why the crew of the St. Jude, including its fishing master, Paul Raikeve, is entirely Fijian. The Fijian crew is paid the same wages local crews would be, says Malley, taking home shares of each trip’s catch, plus a cut of what they sell at the dock. But the reliance on international crews by tuna boats is also made complicated by immigration policies and treaties. While the St. Jude’s customer that day at Fishermen’s Terminal was welcome to step onto the boat and examine the albacore he was buying, the actual crewmembers were not legally allowed to step off of it onto dryland.

Normally, the Malleys solve this problem by drydocking in Canada and by flying their crew home from Vancouver. But in 2023, that wasn’t legally possible either, so the St. Jude did things the old-fashioned way. After selling off most of its tuna at Fishermen’s Terminal, the boat headed up to Bellingham to drop off the remainder at a cannery, then set out through the Salish Sea, beyond the Juan de Fuca Strait, and into the open ocean for a 29-day run to Fiji.