In the 1980s, anglers fishing the offshore canyons along the Northeast and mid-Atlantic coasts enjoyed an amazing tuna bite. As word spread and more crews perfected their techniques, the catch ratio surged. On any given day, you would see huge packs of boats working these deepwater ledges, and few of them went home empty-handed. The tuna caught were often sold at the dock, boxed up and shipped off to Japan. Conservation, let alone tagging, wasn't the preeminent thought in most captains' minds.

One such tuna trip off of New Jersey with Capt. Pete Barrett and AFTCO's Bill Shedd and Greg Stotesbury became the impetus for a new era in conservation.

"That trip always stuck in my mind," says Barrett, a charter captain for 30 years and the former editor of the New Jersey edition of The Fisherman magazine. "We went on an overnight trip starting at Hudson Canyon. We caught bigeye, yellowfin and albacore tuna. On our way in, we stopped at an area known as the Slough and caught some bluefin and small yellowfin as well. On that one trip, we were able to catch all four of the major tuna species in the Atlantic. We tagged 27 tuna and took home fish. I think it really got Bill thinking."

Shedd saw the value of these tuna, not in terms of the price per pound, but as a resource. "We could count hundreds of sport-fishing boats with the naked eye and knew many hundreds more were out of sight," Shedd says. "Very little tagging data was available for Atlantic tuna at that time, as only a handful of fish were tagged each year. It seemed obvious that at some point in the future, there would be management issues with this valuable resource. If we waited until that problem existed to gather tagging and other important data, it would be too late. By the end of the trip, I was set on developing a program to help increase tag and release."

In 1987, Shedd and Stotesbury came up with the Tag A Tuna For Tomorrow program. At that time, the National Marine Fisheries Service was the main source for tags and tagging data. To help increase access to tags, Shedd convinced NMFS to let AFTCO distribute their tags through tackle stores. "Among other things, we had to ensure NMFS that we could develop a process that would allow us to know where every tag was at any given moment," Shedd says.

While no money was given out, AFTCO generated $50,000 in tackle awards with help from friends in the tackle industry as an incentive to participate. "As it turned out, that was not very effective," Shedd says. "Recognition in fishing magazines and the individual Tag A Tuna flag that people hung on the walls of their homes and the story that went with it proved to be better incentives for future participation."

The program took hold, and many captains and anglers got on board. Capt. Al Anderson, who runs the Prowler out of Point Judith, Rhode Island, won his first AFTCO award in 1989 for tagging bluefin tuna. A biologist by training, Anderson started tagging fish in 1968 and has tagged more than 45,000 to date, including more than 5,000 tuna, and won the AFTCO Flag Award 13 times. "Bill Shedd's efforts to elevate the profile of pelagic-game-fish tagging was a tremendous success and, thanks to the effort of the IGFA, became a well-known, highly recognized pinnacle-of-the-sport event," Anderson says.

Captains such as Anderson and Barrett, who were already tagging fish, felt honored once their efforts began to get recognized. Soon, many more captains followed suit. "We learned from Tag A Tuna that what really motivates people to participate is the sense of doing something valuable for the resource," Shedd says.

Two years after the Tag A Tuna program began, the tournament added a billfish category. "In 1990, we created the yearlong AFTCO Tag/Flag Tournament for both captains and anglers in the Atlantic," Shedd says. "It quickly became the most recognized and prestigious tagging awards program — in large part because of the credibility of the wide range of entities who partnered in the effort."

Ed Scott, the former head of the NMFS Atlantic tagging project called Shedd and asked if AFTCO could put together a tagging-awareness program to include billfish. "He wanted us to expand on the very successful Tag A Tuna tournament, which had greatly increased awareness of, and participation in, the tag and release of bluefin and yellowfin tuna."

Hundreds of captains and anglers started participating in the event — no entry fee required. By simply tagging fish and handing in the corresponding tag cards, crews gained automatic entry into the tournament, and the event continually grew. "The best year of our program has always been the most recent year," Shedd says.

For that reason, many in the sport-fishing community were surprised when Shedd announced that 2006 would be the final year of the Tag/Flag. When AFTCO lost access to tagging data from The Billfish Foundation, they had no choice but to end the tournament, which used data from both TBF and NMFS to determine the winners of the yearlong event, according to Shedd. However, the tagging legacy they started 20 years ago continues on today.