"August 12 didn't start out to be a good day for us, but it turned out to be the best day of the year," said Dave Marciano, owner and skipper of the 36-foot Gloucester fishing vessel, Hard Merchandise.

"It was the biggest tuna I've seen hoisted over the docks in Gloucester," said retired tuna dealer Mark Godfried.

How did this giant fish get landed?

Necessity today

"I've tinkered with the tuna fishing since the early 1990s," said Marciano, who lives in Beverly. "Now I do it out of necessity."

His former mainstay, gillnetting haddock inshore, ended after the fishery powers-that-be increased the netting's minimal mesh size, allowing most of the haddock to swim right through it.

Marciano now seasonally lobsters and hooks groundfish and tuna.

He is regularly helped when they are not in school by his son Joseph, 12, a seventh-grader at Briscoe Middle School in Beverly who wants to fish commercially after college, and his nephew, 19-year-old Jason Muenzner of Salem.

"The tuna fishing is torture nowadays," Marciano said.

His grueling tuna season stretches from July into November, often day after day, calm or not. The Hard Merchandise leaves the dock between 1:30 and 3 a.m. and sometimes returns as late as midnight. Sometimes it's out overnight.

"We fish from sunrise to sunset," Marciano said. "The predawn hours are when you net your bait for the day." The crew hopes to snag herring in its bait net.

Once on the grounds, which can be three hours off Cape Ann, the Hard Merchandise anchors. Marciano stays in the wheelhouse much of the time and looks for tuna marks on the sounding machine, while Jason and Joseph work the deck chumming, jigging up live baits and manning the five rods and reels set in a steel bar over the open stern of the boat.

The young fishermen also fight any hooked tuna.

"Joe landed his first giant tuna when he was 9. I'm just the closer," said Marciano, who harpoons, cools down and bleeds the tired fish before hauling them aboard.

The dogfish plague has made tuna fishing with baited hooks frustrating today.

"Because of the dogs, it's been hard to catch the giants (with chumming and baited hooks)," Marciano said. "You can still catch the small tunas trolling. We have had tuna fish here all season, but the dogs have largely killed it.

"Not a lot of guys are fishing because of the dog thing. The tuna fleet in Gloucester numbers about five," Marciano said.

Chumming attracts dense concentrations of the approximately 3-foot-long dogfish, and they keep coming and coming and coming. These small sharks beat most tuna to the baited hooks and often damage the tuna gear in the process.

The Hard Merchandise crew equates dropping down live baits among the dogfish to "sacrificing another Christian to the lions."

Marciano believes the number of big tuna in the Gulf of Maine is low today because "herring don't exist like they used to here - the unnaturally high biomass of dogfish has thinned them out."

Most of the tuna he has landed so far this season have had cod, flounder, pollock and even monkfish in their bellies. Since these groundfish don't have the high fat content of herring, many of his tuna tended to be on the lean side.

Once a fish has been spotted on the sounding machine, his crew will drop the lines and hope that the tuna will get to a baited hook before the dogfish.

"You sit there (in the wheelhouse) and watch the machine, keep chumming and wait for that 30 seconds of opportunity," said Marciano. "Eventually a fish will come by. You have to be ready."

'Got a mark'

"That day (Aug. 12) started off terribly. Our bait net got jammed with baby redfish, and we caught only a handful of herring," Marciano said.

The Hard Merchandise soon anchored alone in about 70 fathoms of water on Jeffrys Ledge.

But at 8 a.m. an excited Marciano shouted to Jason and Joseph, "We got one; we're marking."

Marciano added, "The tuna was down deep below the dogs, about 20 fathoms. I knew that was a big fish; you can tell by the size of the mark. Two other tuna soon joined the big fish. We knew we had a hot spot."

Four hours later, the big tuna finally bit a hook baited with a live pollock that Joe had jigged up.

"We had the fish hooked on the shyest gear - 170-lb test line. The tuna ran down and made a long run," Marciano said.

Jason and Joseph skillfully fought this fish for more than two hours.

"You have to give him slack, otherwise he'll shake the hook or snap the line," said Marciano. "You wear him down. It's all patience and more of a finesse and not a brute strength thing."

"The fight seemed very long," said Joseph.

Jason added, "I was just scared about losing him the whole time."

At times during the fight, the tip of the rod bent right into the water.

"This tuna emptied the reel (of its line) five times," Marciano said. An average fish empties the reel just once before tiring.

"The plotter showed this fish traveled about five miles during the fight. Talk about walking on a razor blade for over two and a half hours. That little leader and hook were the only connection between the fish and a pay check."

After the young fishermen got the tired tuna alongside the boat, Marciano closed the fight by harpooning the fish and placing a strap around its tail.

Before pulling the tuna aboard, "you hook him in the lip and tow him slowly - swim him - to cool him down and then bleed him. This prevents the core of the fish from getting burned. This is a crucial step in bringing in a top-quality fish," Marciano said.

852 pounds, dressed

This fish was so big that it wouldn't fit through the space on the open stern between the deck and the rod and reel bar that the crew's other tuna have. The bar had to be removed to get the tuna aboard.

Once it was landed, Joseph kissed the fish's head.

The tuna measured approximately 129 inches long. Its dressed weight (minus head, tail and viscera) hit 852 pounds.

"We estimate it weighed 1,120 lbs whole. This was the biggest one I've ever caught," said Marciano.

The giant found its way to the Japanese market for an undisclosed price.

Remarkably, Marciano and crew have landed 10 tuna so far this season under these nearly impossible dogfish conditions. In better years, Marciano has had 22 fish.

"The average price per pound for tuna this year has been around $10 to $11," Marciano said. "You're not getting those $10,000 fish any more. Now, there's plenty of product around thanks in part to the fish farms in the Mediterranean. Before, you could get lucky when there were no fish around."

Marciano added, "All you can do is keep trying, and it will pay off."