That evidence matters, because catch-and-release is not the same as no harm. Permit holders record the fish that die at the boat, and that at-vessel mortality is genuinely very low – but it is not the whole story, because a bluefin can swim away strongly and still not survive the stress of the fight. That post-release mortality is a figure that counts for the stock, and it is one only tagging can reveal: studies of rod-and-line bluefin put it at somewhere between three and six per cent when the fish is handled to best practice.

Everything in the training exists to hold the harm at the bottom of that range: short fight times, appropriate gear choices, and holding the fish alongside to recover for a full five minutes before letting it go. A well-run release fishery is not one that pretends it does no harm, but one that has measured the harm and engineered it down to a few per cent.

But those numbers describe the stock, not the animal at the end of your line – and to an angler the two are different responsibilities. Keeping a population healthy is one obligation; returning each individual fish in the best condition possible is another, and it is one many anglers and skippers take just as seriously. That is the whole point of the training and the code of conduct behind it – not box-ticking, but a considered, evidence-based answer to a simple duty of care.

Every step has a reason that science can defend, because if you intend to let a fish go, you owe it your best effort to see that it swims away strong.

And where it does unfortunately occur, that harm, set against the wider fishery, is vanishingly small. The United Kingdom’s entire bluefin quota for 2026 is 230 tonnes a year. And it has made a deliberate choice: across this quota cycle, which runs from 2026 to 2028, it is not deploying that full allocation, holding a portion in reserve rather than fishing it to the limit. It is a precautionary instinct, and a sensible one – the headroom to widen access exists, but it is being released in measured steps rather than all at once. Of that, 120 tonnes goes in 2026 to a new commercial fishery of around 30 boats, and less than 20 tonnes is set aside to cover the incidental deaths of the whole recreational fleet.

Now lift your eyes to the ocean basin: at its most recent meeting, ICCAT raised the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin catch to 48,403 tonnes a year. The UK’s whole share is around half of one per cent of that, and the recreational fishery’s actual mortality footprint roughly four hundredths of one per cent. Whatever pressure bears on the bluefin of the eastern Atlantic, it does not come from a few hundred anglers catching fish over the side of charter boats and private recreational vessels.

It is worth being fair about who shares this water too. The thirty-odd commercial vessels now licensed alongside the anglers are not industrial ships; they fish with rod and reel, one fish at a time, about as selective a method as exists. The true contrast is not between recreation and commerce, but between everything that happens on a rod and line in our waters and the industrial reality further out – the purse-seiners that can encircle an entire school, the longliners that set thousands of hooks across the open Atlantic, the fleets that have made bluefin a commodity measured by the tonne.

Two boats can fish for the same species in the same ocean and be doing utterly different things.

None of which is to say the fishery has it all worked out. Access is the sharpest of the unresolved questions. A clarification is owed first, because fisheries are devolved: what follows describes England alone. Wales runs its own recreational bluefin arrangements, as do the Crown Dependencies such as Jersey, and they do not all approach it the same way. For now, permits are weighted towards charter vessels, with only a smaller number reaching private boats – a defensible way to concentrate a new and demanding fishery in experienced, accountable hands, but one that leaves many capable private skippers on the outside looking in, many of whom have made significant investment into the fishery and are now locked out.

Where demand outstrips the permits available, places are settled by lottery – even-handed on its face, but among the most contentious features of the fishery, since a random draw can leave a committed, well-prepared skipper ashore while passing another through on luck alone. That owes less to any failing by those who run it than to the hard arithmetic of a small fishery with more willing hands than places – but it is keenly felt, and it is part of why access remains so sore a subject. Yet the draw has one real virtue, easily lost in the frustration: it lets newcomers in. A system that instead rewarded experience or past participation alone would soon harden into a closed shop – the same boats every season and no way in for anyone new – and a fair fishery has to keep a genuine door open to fresh entrants, or it slowly becomes the property of those who got there first.

If a recovered public resource is to be fished recreationally, the question of who gets to fish it, and how fairly, cannot be ducked. Geography is the other complication. Access ought not to be skewed towards one stretch of coast – yet spreading it cannot mean funnelling the whole fleet into a single honeypot port, concentrating all that fishing effort, and all that disturbance, on one patch of sea.

Fairness between regions and keeping effort sensibly spread are not the same goal, and balancing them is part of the same unfinished puzzle. The phased approach now being taken – opening the fishery gradually across the quota cycle rather than in a single leap – is the right shape for that question, even if it is cold comfort to those still waiting their turn.

Widening access responsibly, without diluting the standards that make the fishery sustainable in the first place, is among the harder tasks ahead, and one the UK Government have not yet solved.

Which is why the real test of this fishery still lies ahead, and it is not the one the headlines reach for. The training is, in truth, the easy part; so is the tiny tonnage. The hard, unfinished work is everything around them: two sectors, recreational and commercial, learning to share one recovered fish, one patch of summer water and one fragile social licence to fish it at all; and a recreational fleet still working out, honestly, how widely and how fairly its own access can be shared.

The measure of a mature fishery is not how lightly it can fish in its first flush of good behaviour, but whether it can keep faith with a recovered species once the novelty fades and the competition sharpens. Together, we have built the standards, through years of unglamorous partnership; living up to them – and widening them fairly – is the work that remains. 

These fish came back to us against the odds, and the conversation about how we share them is only beginning; I do not pretend this is the last word, and a fish that stirs feelings this strong will surely call me back to writing more before long.

But for now I am content to picture that bluefin – revived, released, somewhere out in the dark water – are still swimming, and still, in the truest sense, are ours to share.