A few nights ago, my wife and I went out for dinner at a
local seafood restaurant. We ordered a
bunch of raw oysters to start, and then the waiter told us about a special appetizer
that was not on the menu.
He said that “We have a seared bluefin tuna, just in from
Montauk…” and began to describe the dish.
It sounded good. I
wanted to eat it. But the word “bluefish”
got my thoughts going, because a bluefin tuna has to be at least 73 inches
long before it can legally be sold, and that’s a lot of fish for a smallish
local restaurant to buy.
So I asked, “By any chance, do you know how big the fish
was?”
And he said, “One hundred ten pounds.”
At which point, we ordered the crab cakes, because the
bluefin was clearly illegal. A
73-inch bluefin should weigh well over 200 pounds—probably something close
to 225—and even dressed, will weigh more than 110.
Besides, there haven’t been a lot of 73-inch bluefin around
Long Island lately. On the other hand,
there had been plenty of fish in the 100-150 pound range, and you didn’t have
to go all the way to Montauk to find one. Fish of
that size were being regularly brought back to the local docks.
By anglers.
The odds were very high that the “special” bluefin appetizer
that the restaurant was serving came from a fish caught by an ostensibly recreational boat, and sold illegally at the restaurant’s back door.
After all, it’s not an uncommon occurrence. I’ve been fishing offshore since the late
1970s, and a lot of folks who claim to be recreational anglers, and have
neither a New York Foodfish License nor a New York Landing Permit, regularly
market their tuna, sometimes through seafood dealers and more often through a
shop’s or a restaurant’s back door.
Sometimes
they get caught, but the immediate cash return, compared to the remote
chance that they will be caught and fined, makes such criminal sale seem like a
reasonable gamble.
And yes, the practice is pretty widespread.
Things are even worse in the striped bass fishery, where
back-door sales to restaurants by so-called recreational anglers are routine
events. In his book, Caught, author Jeff Nichols shed some
much-needed daylight on a thriving black market fueled by the many
recreational anglers who have decided that the best way to fuel their fishing
habit is to turn their striped bass into illicit dollars that can in turn fuel
future excursions, where more bass will hopefully be caught, and illegally sold…
Every fall, if the striped bass set up in front of Fire
Island Inlet, as they often do, many local “recreational” boats will exceed
their legal bag limits, sometimes making more than one trip each day, in order
to illegally sell bass to restaurants and retail outlets.
Such behavior is so common that it rarely
even draws comment, much less censure. A
few years ago, I resigned from a fishing club that I had belonged to for more than
30 years, after a member of its Board of Directors was busted by conservation
officers for illegally harvesting striped bass to sell in a restaurant that he
owned. I left because the club completely ignored such misconduct, with the President calling
him a “good member” and everyone else shrugging it off.
Such behavior is nothing new.
I grew up in Connecticut, which was a “gamefish” state that
outlawed commercial striped bass fishing during the 1950s. Yet it was common knowledge that recreational
fishermen—including all of the so-called “sharpies” that stood atop the striped
bass anglers’ pecking order—sold their catch through local outlets as a matter
of course, the "gamefish" law be damned.
Thus, I had to laugh when I read a
recent op-ed piece in the on-line edition of Sport Fishing Magazine, in which Mike Leonard, spokesman for the
American Sportfishing Association, tries to justify weakening the
conservation and management provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation
and Management Act by arguing that
“…anglers have always been at the forefront of conservation
efforts,”
and that
“Most of the opposition [to weakening Magnuson-Stevens] is
based on a fundamental belief that if you give anglers an inch, they’ll take a
mile. They like to promote the idea that
any changes to insert flexibility into MSA to improve recreational fisheries
management will somehow lead to rampant overfishing. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
“It’s important during this debate over the need for more
reasonable access to federal fisheries that neither the public nor fisheries
administrators lose sight of anglers’ long-held commitment to conservation…”
Yes, some anglers are committed to
fisheries conservation. I like to think
that I’m one of them, and that the folks who I fish with are, too.
The striped bass fishing community contains a
lot of conservation advocates, particularly among the surfcasters and
light-tackle boats, although it also contains a lot of poachers. Conservationists tend to abound in the “difficult” fisheries—striped bass, red
drum in the surf, bonefish, tarpon, billfish, permit—while in the “meat”
fisheries, they’re harder to find.
As Mr. Leonard points out, striped bass fishermen played a
role in turning back a recent effort at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission to increase the striped bass kill; however, he ignores another
ASMFC-managed species, tautog, where recreational fishing interests swarmed thehearings in lynch-mob mode, opposing any action to begin rebuilding fish stocksthat have been overfished for more than 21 years.
Mr. Leonard deny that anglers will engage in “rampant
overfishing” without the current strictures of Magnuson-Stevens, but it’s hard
to ignore the fact that not only anglers, but the
same American Sportfishing Association that he represents, recently praised a
federal reopening of the Gulf of Mexico private boat red snapper season, thanking
“Governor Scott, the [Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission],
and [Congressmen] Neal Dunn and Matt Gaetz for their support of additional
Federal days of Gulf red snapper fishing for recreational anglers. While we are grateful for an extended season,
it’s clear that long-term solutions are needed in order to address the
shortcomings of our current federal fisheries management system.”
Another American Sportfishing Association representative, speaking
for Keep Florida Fishing, an ASA affiliate, said
“An extended Federal Gulf red snapper season will have a
tremendous positive economic impact on Florida’s communities, which depend on
our state’s $9.6 billion sportfishing industry.
We appreciate efforts to expand access to our fisheries, and we will
continue to push for improvements to federal management of recreational
fishing.”
They lavished such praise even though, in reopening the
season, the
Commerce Department itself admitted that the reopening
“will necessarily mean that the private recreational sector
would substantially exceed its catch limit, which was designed to prevent
overfishing the stock. [emphasis added]”
Conservation
groups who brought suit against the Commerce Department in reaction to the
reopening estimate that private-boat anglers will overfish their catch limit by
between 6.8 and 9.6 million pounds, an amount that is certainly “substantial.”
The entire annual catch limit for red snapper—recreational and
commercial combined—is only around 15 million pounds. The fact that American Sportfishing
Association praised the reopening, and so effectively condoned anglers
overfishing their quota by no less than 7 millon pounds, makes its reassurances that weakening Magnuson-Stevens
won’t “lead to rampant [recreational] overfishing” ring very, very hollow
indeed…
Because the fact is, anglers aren’t angels. Some have a stronger conservation ethic than
others, and some have no ethics at all. The only way to protect fish stocks—and ethical
anglers—from the poachers and the fish hogs is to have an effective federal fishery
management laws.
I keep remembering a conversation I once had with a fluke
fisherman from Staten Island.
I was arguing that one of the benefits of a salt water
fishing license was that New York would be able to afford more conservation
enforcement officers, but he didn’t believe that would be a good thing. As he
put it (and I might get a word or two wrong here, but you’ll get the gist),
“You spend all that money on bait, gas and tackle, you wanna
bring somet’in’ home ta eat. You go out,
you can’t catch a legal fish, well, you spend all that money, ya gotta do what
ya gotta do…”
So if you want to believe that all anglers are on the
forefront of fisheries conservation, and you believe ASA’s proposition that
they wouldn’t overfish if the law gave them a chance, well, I won’t say
anything about a bridge in Brooklyn.
But they’re a guy in Bay Shore who might sell you a bluefin,
and there are plenty out in Montauk who will sell you a bass…
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