Wearing a wetsuit and snorkel and carrying his speargun, Jason Own emerged from the waters of Sitka’s Crescent Harbor on Aug. 29 with the 18-pound, 30-inch-long skipjack tuna he had speared just moments before.

Cheers erupted from the onlookers who had gathered to see the tuna, a species rarely seen in waters around Sitka.

Own, who is from California and lives in Sitka, had spent about 40 minutes in the water waiting out the tuna before eventually spearing it, pulling it to shore and bonking it on the head.

In a phone call with the Sitka Sentinel, Own said he first heard about the rare sighting of a tuna in the harbor around 11 a.m. that day as he was packing for an upcoming move to Thailand, where he will be working.

“I was like, ‘Oh, man, this sounds really cool,’” Own said. “But I thought, ‘Let me just finish up what I have to do, and then in a few hours, if the tuna is still there, maybe I’ll pop by Crescent.’”

As a free-diver, he often hunts fish like lingcod and king salmon with his speargun, he said. Spearing a tuna has been on his bucket list for years.

Catching tuna is unusual in Southeast Alaska, but it’s not unheard of, Alaska Department of Fish and Game Sitka area management biologist Troy Tydingco said in an email. He said they’re found from time to time in Sitka waters, and albacore show up seasonally off Prince of Wales Island. He said this was probably the first tuna ever landed in Crescent Harbor.

Tydingco said the most recent landing of a skipjack in Southeast was last year near Yakutat, although there may have been others caught in the past year.

The state doesn’t set bag or season limits on tuna, but tuna fishers “do need to have a sport license and also must comply with applicable methods and means like rod and reel or — for someone swimming or diving — speargun,” the biologist said.

Own said he arrived at the harbor around 2:30 p.m. on Aug. 29, eager to see the rare fish. About 20 people were on the dock watching the tuna, some attempting to snag or net it as swam by, he said.

With encouragement from the onlookers, Own got his speargun from his car and donned his wetsuit and snorkel mask. He got in the water and positioned himself beneath the Crescent Park dock ramp that’s closer to Centennial Hall.

“The bridge cast a decent shadow,” Own said. “I thought that if I blended in with the rocks and in the shade that, if I got lucky, the tuna would come close enough.”

He knew the fish was swimming a loop between the two ends of the harbor.

“I think I was in the water for like, 30, 40 minutes,” Own said. “Basically, it just involved me, like being super still, with my head in the water the entire time, trying to control my breathing and, yeah, causing as little wake and disturbance in the water as possible.”

“Around the 30-minute mark, I felt like I was about to quit,” he said. “Sure enough, around the 40-minute mark, I just heard people screaming from above … that there’s a fish that was approaching me, and yeah, then it swam by.”

At first, he didn’t have a good shot at it, “but then it made eye contact with me and quickly turned its head into a direction that I thought I could make use of. I ended up getting a clean shot right under the gill plate.”

The fish began pulling hard, seeming to exert two to three times more force than any king salmon that he had ever speared.

“I quickly realized right after I shot the tuna that it was either gonna, like, pull me to the center of the docks — I didn’t have my fins to resist it — or I had to, really quickly, just run out of the harbor. And so that’s why I ran out.”

After filleting the fish with a friend, Own was able to share pieces with friends.

“It was really good,” he said.