Ten or twelve years ago, I was down in Islamorada, and
jumped aboard a local party boat for the day.
It wasn’t peak season.
On the plus side, that meant that there weren’t many people on board the
boat, and we didn’t have to jostle for a favored stern spot. On the downside, one of the reason that there
weren’t many anglers was that there weren’t too many fish, at least compared to
other times of the year, and while the fishing was great, the catching was a
little slow.
The boat anchored uptide of a patch reef, and tossed over a
few balls of chum. It wasn’t long before
the water a few dozen yards astern began to take on a shimmering, golden hue as
a swarm of yellowtail snapper, responding to the chum, rose up off the bottom.
They weren’t big fish.
Patch-reef yellowtail, living on pieces of bottom near popular ports, are
fished pretty hard. “Flag” yellowtail,
as the big fish are called, are almost impossible to find there; most are a
couple of inches above or below the minimum legal size.
Considering the conditions, we started out OK. The first yellowtail of the morning are
always naïve, and I was able to put a couple of half-decent fish on ice before
the panicked struggles of our hooked snapper started making the rest of the school
spooky. Cero mackerel passed by, and
some of them came aboard. But as the
morning wore on, the fishing inevitably slowed.
And what happened then was, perhaps, inevitable as well.
A tourist in the starboard stern corner caught an
undersized yellowtail snapper.
That, in itself, was nothing new; we had been catching
shorts all morning, and had been quickly dropping them back over the side. But the tourist wasn’t following the
program. Instead of releasing his fish,
he was walking it over to the cooler.
And that’s when the captain of the boat got involved.
“Where are you going with that fish? It’s too small. Put it back.”
That didn’t go over too well with the tourist, who responded,
in the unmistakable accent of the New York Metro region,
“It’s my fish, and I can do what I want with it.”
The fact that keeping the fish was illegal seemed to be lost
on the tourist, but not on the captain, who was beginning to get a little
annoyed.
“I’m not going to lose my license over your fish. Put it back in the water.”
Which led to the immediate response of
“I paid to be on this boat, and I can do what I want with my
fish.”
At that point, the captain pulled out his wallet, took out
the amount of the tourist’s fare, and said
“Here’s your money.
Get off the deck. Go sit in the
cabin, and never come out on this boat again.”
Because that’s how they do it down South. I’ve fished for snapper on various party
boats in the Keys and the Gulf of Mexico, and have found that the captains and
mates down there take pains to obey the laws, largely because the boat can be
in legal jeopardy if they do not. And
the snapper-grouper management plans don’t permit fish to be filleted at sea;
nothing gets cut until it’s back at the dock, making undersized fish a lot
easier for law enforcement officers to find.
It’s a little different up here.
That was illustrated recently when enforcement officers from
the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation boarded the party
boat Fin Chaser at the dock at Star
Island Marina in Montauk.
“One of Montauk’s headboats pulled into the slip on Thursday
to be greeted by a couple of guys in the green uniforms of the DEC. They boarded the boat and started to inspect
the anglers’ coolers, finding that the first one had 96 seabass, which is 93
over the legal limit. As they continued
the inspection on the starboard side, there was a massive fish kill on the port
side, with dead seabass floating all over the place, and anglers who had not
caught anything during the trip filing off.
After the dust cleared, there were over a dozen coolers left with no
owners that held over a thousand seabass.
Since no one claimed them, ownership appeared to belong to the captain
and owner of the boat. Stay tuned.”
Those who kept up with the story soon discovered the
critical nuance. An
article that appeared about a week after Capt. Kelly’s report, in the Easthampton Star, noted that
“The party boat’s customers were cited for possessing too
many black sea bass and porgies, undersized black sea bass and summer flounder,
and for failure to stop dumping [fish overboard] upon command.
“[The captain was] issued a violation for an incomplete trip
report. Seven other violations, each
carrying a penalty of up to $250, were issued, as well as a misdemeanor charge
of failure to stop dumping upon command, for which the penalty is up to $1,000
and imprisonment of up to one year.
“Environmental conservation law does not hold the owner or
captain responsible for the actions of anglers on his vessel, the [Department
of Environmental Conservation] spokesman said, unless officers witness them
assisting with or taking responsibility for what is occurring.”
And that’s a problem, because as my story from Islamorada
demonstrates, a conscientious captain is the fish’s first line of defense; he
or she is the person best positioned to ensure that fishery laws are obeyed.
The problem is, the captain is always torn between conflicting
motivations. He may be a decent guy, who
honestly doesn’t like to see fares poaching fish. He may be perceptive enough to realize that
overharvesting fish today may very well hurt his business in the future. At the same time, there is a very good chance
that if customers, such as the tourist and would-be poacher down in Islamorada,
are told that they have to release a fish that they want to keep, they’re not
going to come back on the boat any more.
And that’s a threat to future business, too.
Thus, you have the situation that a party boat mate out of
Freeport, New York threw in my face one evening, when I questioned why he and
the rest of his crew allowed passengers to chronically overfish the small
bluefish that were than crowding into the bay.
“You think that I’m going to tell some [racial epithet
deleted] that he can’t keep more than 10 fish?
That’s the difference between me making $20 and $200 in tips in a night!”
So it’s pretty clear that if regulators want the captains
and crews to stop letting their passengers ignore the law, they’re going to have
to give those folks some sort of incentive.
In California, for example, violations of recreational
fishing regulations aboard party boats became so common that enforcement authorities
conducted a year-long undercover operation targeting the captains who abetted
and encouraged their passengers to violate the law. According to the
Los Angeles Times,
“Skipper Rick Powers was handcuffed by a phalanx of officers
and charged with one count of felony conspiracy to violate Fish and Game laws
and six misdemeanor infractions that include using illegal hooks, exceeding
catch limits and keeping prohibited species…
“Later this week, state officials said, misdemeanor
complaints will be filed against 13 other party boat skippers in nine counties…on
a host of additional allegations that involve wounding pelicans and seals, fudging
records to avoid catch limits and catching fish out of season.
“…’Wardens have been overwhelmed with complaints about party
boats,’ said Warden Bob Aldrich, based in Bodega Bay. ‘Guys who are over limit for fish get
encouraged to continue fishing, and their catch is distributed to other
passengers who were seasick’ or didn’t catch their limit, he said.
“No recreational anglers were targeted because they are often
unaware of state regulations, officials said.
Instead, wardens went after the people who they believe should have
known better: boat captains and crews.
“…The most troublesome violations, wardens say, include
exceeding limits on the number of fish, catching undersized fish and then masking
their size by filleting them before the boat returns to the dock; and
[salmon-specific gear regulations].
[emphasis added]”
Some of those violations are unique to California and its
particular mix of fish species, but plenty of them are going to be familiar to
anyone who ever fishes from a party boat in New York or New Jersey, and some of
them fit right in with the allegations arising out of the Fin Chaser incident.
If New York has a real desire to prevent such violations
from occurring in its for-hire fleet, it should be making a serious effort to
impose similar liability on for-hire vessels’ captains and crews. Such liability shouldn’t be onerous—it’s practically
impossible to prevent a passenger intent on poaching from secreting a couple of
illegal fish into a lunch bag or other container—but if the number of illegal
fish exceeds, for the sake of example, 20% of the overall catch, a presumption
that the captain and crew are complicit is not unreasonable.
After all, boats are required to submit
accurate vessel trip reports for every trip made, so “I didn’t know what people
caught” is not a viable excuse.
And, looking at harvest
estimates provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service, it seems that
such a 20% figure might cause quite a bit of grief to folks who presently
consider themselves above the law.
Using 2016 as an example, about 40% of the black sea bass harvested
and sampled on party boats were less than 15 inches long—which was and still is the size
limit (note that NMFS gives the measurement in terms of “fork length” and black
sea bass’ tails are not forked, so it’s possible that the 40% number is a
little high, depending on how the fish are measured, but even half of that
would hit the theoretical 20% minimum).
That number falls to a smaller, but still significant 27% of
undersized summer flounder (the same caveat on fork length applies), but jumps
to 47% of scup being less than 9 inches long (the size limit is 10 inches, but
scup do have forked tails, so an allowance was made for that) and then goes
back down to 20% of striped bass measuring less than 26 inches (the size limit
is 28 inches, but again, a generous 2-inch allowance was made for the fork in
the tail, and assure that I wasn't overstating the scope of the illegal harvest).
So yes, party boats take a lot of short fish—and one has to
remember that the numbers above probably reflect the minimum level of
lawlessness, as anglers don’t have to let NMFS samplers measure their
undersized fish, and black sea bass and scup, at least, can still be legally filleted
at sea, to hide the number of illegal fish actually taken.
So making boat crews responsible for illegal activity on
their vessels is a needed first step, but it is only the first one. Requiring crews to retain the “racks,” the
intact heads, tails and skeleton of filleted fish, is a good next step, to
reduce the number of undersized fish filleted at sea; in New York, such rack
retention is already required for striped bass and summer flounder. Requiring all fish to be filleted on shore is
an even more effective measure, that prevents racks from a previous trip to be
retained to cover the inevitable shorts kept by passengers (a practice that is
currently illegal but, reportedly, far from unknown).
Even so, none of the measures restricting filleting at sea would
have prevented the Fin Chaser
incident, as many of the illegal fish landed were still intact. Thus, it falls back on the need to adopt rules that make violating the law too painful for the vessel and crew to
risk.
Fines alone won’t do that, and in the real world, no judge
is going to impose jail time for some undersized or over-limit fish, absent a long
history of egregious violations.
In the
over-all scheme of things, when overworked and understaffed law enforcement
agencies have difficulty covering all of the docks were violations might occur,
the odds of being caught and fined are fairly remote. That makes even a $1,000 fine just another
cost of doing business.
Take the Fin Chaser as an example. An
article on the incident published in Newsday
states that the boat can carry ‘more than 50 passengers” and charges each one
$90 for a porgy and black sea bass trip; it was allegedly carrying 46
passengers on the day that the enforcement agents came aboard.
But even if it only carried 40 passengers
each day, the fares collected would equal $3,600—a significant sum.
Far from all of that is profit. The boat must pay for fuel and bait, dock
space, insurance and maintenance of the boat and fishing gear. The deck crew largely works for tips, but probably also receives
some fixed income to keep the boat from losing them if weather prevents sailing
for a few days in a row Even so, $1,000
spread out across the entire season—even a few fines of that size—don’t amount
to much of a deterrent.
And as I note earlier, jail isn’t a realistic option .
So what is needed is a sanction that will have some teeth,
and can realistically be imposed. The
answer is something that we see used far too seldom in the for-hire world, the
imposition of administrative sanctions.
That basically means that, after providing the operator an opportunity
to be heard, either NMFS or the State of New York—preferably both—suspend the
permits the boat needs to operate for an appropriate period of time.
While a $1,000 fine might not mean very much, being tied up to
the dock for two weeks during the peak of the season is going to hurt, when no
income is coming in but the fixed expenses for dockage, insurance and crew are still
piling up.
And the boat lying empty at the pier would provide a good
example to other captains and crews thinking about crossing the line, reminding
them why countenancing illegality is just not a good idea.
Right now, there’s just too much illegality going on. It’s time for NMFS and the states to take
meaningful action to get it to stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment