I’ve always had a warm place in my heart for winter
flounder. They were the fish that my
parents and I caught when I was young, the fish that made me an angler even before I
entered grade school.
They were the fish that I caught with my friends when we
walked down to the docks on days off from school, and then later, when we grew
just a little older, from the first boats that we ran by ourselves.
They were the fish that I caught with my wife, before and
after we married, and that we used to celebrate the coming of spring over the course of many
years.
They were the fish that was always around if you knew where
to catch them, that could always be counted on to provide a meal.
We caught them to excess back in the day, when bringing home
a pail full of flounder was considered the norm, and a bulging burlap feed sack
or a bushel basket loaded right to the rim was nothing abnormal when fishing
was good.
Far too many flounder were wasted in those days gone by, fed
to tomato plants rather than people when cleaning the fish grew overly onerous,
or just tossed in the garbage at some point in time after freezer burn set in.
And as too often happens when folks waste what they have,
the population crashed, doomed by overharvest and the fishing industry’s
incessant fight against rules that might let it rebuild.
Thus, just a few days ago, I was interested to read an
article from Sport Fishing magazine announcing that flounder were back up in
Boston.
The piece was written in the same rosy tones that are
typical for articles of its kind. It
announced that
“Winter flounder, aka blackbacks, have made an amazing
comeback in the waters of Boston Harbor, marking a return to the type of
fishing that drew busloads of anglers from as far away as New York in the 1970s
and early 1980s. Overfishing and
pollution once decimated the fishery, but tighter regulation on inshore gill-netting
and improvements to Boston’s sewage management system have spawned a return to
the glory days of flounder fishing…”
It all sounds pretty wonderful. And it would be, if it only were true.
Let me start out by saying that the winter flounder angling
around Boston Harbor is probably the best flounder fishing to be found anywhere
on the coast.
But let me finish up by saying that, compared to the sort of
fishing that we saw back in the 1970s, it’s still not very good.
Yes, I know that statement contradicts a quote in the Sport
Fishing article, in which Barry Gibson, a charter boat captain and former
magazine editor who grew up in the region, insists that
“flounder fishing today is every bit as productive as it was
35 years ago.”
But I was alive and fishing back in the ‘70s, too. Grew up in New England, graduated from a
Massachusetts college in ’76 and worked in a tackle shop through the summer of
’78, and anyone who says that the fishing today matches Quincy (where you
rented a boat to fish Boston Harbor) back in those years probably should get a
checkup for Alzheimer’s disease.
Right now, the
bag limit for Gulf of Maine winter flounder in Massachusetts is 8 fish,
with a 12-inch minimum size. Back in the
‘70s, there was no bag or size limit for winter flounder in New York or New
Jersey, and catching just 8 would be a very bad day.
In fact, ten years ago, when I quit fishing
for winter flounder here on Long Island because the stock was showing signs of
collapse, I averaged 10 fish—myself—per trip, so bringing home a mere 8 fish
wouldn’t even be close to a good day by traditional New York standards.
For Quincy, back then, it would be pretty awful.
Folks didn't ride buses for four hours, each way, just to bring home 8 flounders for dinner.
Sport Fishing Magazine may say that winter flounder fishing
has returned to its former quality up around Boston, but the folks who live
there know better. About two years ago,
the Telegram, a local newspaper,
addressed the situation, and what it reported is a lot closer to the truth.
“Boston Harbor’s winter flounder are decreasing in number and
size…
“As [Director of the Division of Marine Fisheries, Paul]
Diodati’s data clearly reveals, the peak of recreational and commercial fishing
harvests was back in 1982. Since then,
state water harvests have precipitously declined, in part because of combined
overfishing from both commercial and recreational fishermen.
“In fact, recreational fishermen took more flounder than
commercial fishermen during two years of the 1980s decline. Surprisingly, the overwhelmingly beneficial
cleanup of Boston Harbor, as well as other environmental changes, may have been
even more significant factors in the area’s diminishing flounder fishing.
“The lessening of sewage discharge and cessation of sludge
dumping in Boston Harbor began in 1991…The result of these anti-pollution
measures was a greater than 90 percent decrease in organic material in the
harbor’s bottom sediments. That drop in
pollution counterintuitively coincided with a precipitous drop in winter
flounder populations.
“With less organic matter to feed on, tiny organisms like
amphipods and polychaetes—species that constitute a critical amount of flounder
food—declined significantly. Sewage, it
turns out, is good for benthic infauna, the basis for much inshore fish
production and growth.
“Diodati notes that ‘While Boston Harbor appears to be a
healthier system for winter flounder to reside in, as evidenced by a greatly decreased
prevalence of skin ulcers and liver disease, their prey has been lowered
significantly. This likely means that Boston
Harbor can no longer support the level of winter flounder abundance seen from
1960-1990.’ [emphasis added]”
We can argue about the beneficial aspects of sewage in
harbor waters, and reasonable people may very well find other reasons for the
Boston Harbor flounders’ decline.
However, what local folks, and local fishery managers, seem
to agree on is that the decline is fact, and that Boston Harbor’s flounder abundance
has “precipitously declined.”
We shouldn’t
be arguing about that.
So while there’s nothing wrong with going up to Boston
Harbor and taking home a few flounder, while enjoying the best winter flounder
fishing that remains anywhere along the coast, there is something wrong—very wrong—about a magazine heralding what is historically pretty slow fishing as “a return to
the glory days.”
It’s wrong because it encourages the “shifting baseline
syndrome.” That was first described,
with respect to fisheries, by biologist Daniel Pauley in “Anecdotes
and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries,” where he wrote
“this syndrome has arisen because each generation of
fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species
composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to
evaluate changes. When the next generation
starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at
that time that serve as a new baseline.
The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual
accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and
inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from
overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures.”
What is true of fisheries scientists is true of fishermen as
well; anglers who didn’t know Quincy in the ‘70s and ‘80s may well think that
today’s fishing is, in fact, good.
And that is what makes articles such as the one in Sport
Fishing so insidiously dangerous.
While writers may feel that they need to strike a rah-rah,
the-good-times-are-back sort of pose to make readers want to go fishing (and
buy their advertisers’ goods), by doing so they create the false impression
that today’s fishing is as good as it gets, and that there is no reason to try
to make things any better.
By encouraging anglers to let their baselines shift, and
believe that poor-to-mediocre fishing is in fact very good, writers and
publishers merely help to assure that angling in the future will be far less rewarding,
and so less enjoyable, than it was in the past, and help pave the way for the
sport’s decline and perhaps its demise.
Instead, publications would do their readers--and in the long run, themselves--a far better
service if, while encouraging them to make the most of what they have today,
they also remind them of what they have lost, and encourage them to work to
recover depleted stocks so that they may enjoy a far more abundant tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment