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Late in February, 2003, Tiburon Engineering was invited to send two Smart Shift reels out on a 90-day tuna tagging expedition organized by senior research scientist Kurt Schaefer of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC). Kurt and his research partner Dan Fuller were about to embark on their third such tagging trip where they target Pacific bigeye tuna in equatorial waters.
The IATTC team chartered the commercial lift-pole tuna vessel "Her Grace" out of San Diego, California. The total numbers of tunas tagged and released during the cruise were as follows: bigeye tuna: 8,695, yellowfin tuna: 871, skipjack tuna: 148, total fish: 9,714
Most of these fish were caught by crewmen with the use of lift poles fished from the racks. The fish are lifted from the water and immediately placed into specially designed cradles where they are measured, tagged and released. The majority of the fish are tagged with a "spaghetti" tag placed at the base of the second dorsal fin. Eighty of the bigeye tuna were tagged with an archival tag that is surgically implanted into the gut cavity and sewn up with the light sensor exposed. 
When the fish go deep and won't his the lift-pole feathers, the crew resorts to hand-lines and rods & reels. All of the rod & reel fish are caught on iron jigs. The name of the game is to land them as quickly as possible to ensure the capture and release of healthy fish.
Kurt Schaefer and Dan Fuller are dedicated researchers who work full-time to meet the responsibilities of the IATTC. To many of us, organizations like the IATTC or the NMFS are just acronyms for large faceless governmental organizations. Kurt and Dan are the guys who work in the trenches and turn all of the boring statistics into powerful tools to ensure that we have fish for the future. Tiburon Engineering is honored to have the opportunity to contribute to such an important project, and extremely proud to be part of this team.
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