Thursday, January 18, 2018

WHAT DEFINES A "COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN"?

When I was growing up in 1960s Connecticut, the line between “recreational” and “commercial” fishermen was faint and ill-defined.

We all knew that the draggermen further up in New England clearly fell into the commercial camp, and that the families fishing for snapper blues under the Route 95 bridge were just as clearly recreational, but between those two extremes, the distinction was a little vague.

My father didn’t sell fish, and neither most of the other guys who hung out at the town dock most nights, talking about stripers and bluefish, and days long gone by, while I and the other kids watched the killies swarm along the seawall and threw the occasional rock at any water rat unwise enough to stick its head out from between the stones.

But every now and then, someone else would walk by, either going down to their boat to fish through the night, or laboriously climbing up the ramp that led to the landing, a trash can filled with bluefish and maybe some stripers in tow.  

Everyone knew them, and they got a solemn nod and maybe a word as they passed, but they weren’t a regular part of the nightly gathering. 

And after they passed, someone would often mutter, while maybe shaking his head, “He’s selling those fish.”

A lot of that disapproval came from the fact that, even back then, Connecticut had outlawed the sale of locally-caught striped bass, so any sales were clearly illegal—even if a restaurant less than five minutes from the dock, notorious for buying every bass such folks wanted to sell, was never visited by the folks who enforced that particular law.

The rest came from a general notion that sportsmen didn’t sell their catch.  And make no mistake—the fishermen who were selling their bass and bluefish would never have called themselves “commercial.”  They were tree trimmers, electricians and butchers and such, people with small businesses or regular 9-to-5 jobs, who never towed a trawl or set a gill net, but figured that they could make a little cash on the side by selling their excess fish.

The fact that no license was required, even when they sold legal catch such as porgies or blues, made separating the commercial from the recreational fishermen a little more confusing.

I eventually learned that in most other states, where striped bass sale was legal, anglers routinely sold their excess catch, but still considered themselves to be recreational fishermen.

As I grew older, and took a summer job in a tackle store, things didn’t get any simpler.  The shop had a lot of wealthy customers who came from all over the New York metropolitan area, and kept their boats in the nearby harbor.  Some of them regularly ran their boats, many of them the sort of big, expensive Bertrams and Hatterases that college kids like me only fished from in our dreams, out to Montauk, Rhode Island or even Nantucket, were they fished offshore for tuna, swordfish and marlin.

Such folks were multimillionaires, back in the day when that term denoted far more wealth than it does today.  And yet, I was shocked to learn, they regularly sold their tuna “to pay for the trip,” and felt adamantly entitled to do so, although they would have been mortally insulted if anyone had suggested that they were “commercial fishermen.”

Things began to change in, if I recall correctly, the late 1970s, when Massachusetts became the first northeastern state to require anglers who sell their catch to buy a license.  Today, that requirement hardly seems shocking, but at the time, it was viewed as a radical change from the norm, radical enough that Salt Water Sportsman magazine published an article “To Sell a Fat Fish”, which explored the implications of the state turning what was still viewed as recreation—despite the fact that fish were being sold—into a business.

I was already living on Long Island when New York began requiring a similar license, back around 1985.  And I remember the indignant responses from many members of the offshore fishing club I had joined.  In particular, I recall the response of one member, a part-time outdoor writer who held a good job at a Manhattan bank, when he learned that none of the folks who he regular fished with had purchased a commercial license.  

It was something like “Well, one of us better get one.  Watch!  We’re going to catch a big mako, and won’t be able to sell it…”

But he, like so many “recreational” anglers, didn’t consider himself “commercial” at all and, in fact, frequently blamed full-time commercial fishermen for our fisheries’ various ills.

In time, New York’s laws tightened up.  The number of foodfish licenses was capped by statute, and an income requirement, limiting licenses to those who depended on fishing for at least a substantial part of their livelihood, was adopted, although early license buyers had been grandfathered in.  Such limitation allowed better allowed limited resources, and limiting commercial quotas, to be caught and sold by people who depended on fishing-related income for the basics and life, and didn’t just use it to help pay back the loan on a $250,000 fishing machine.

Today, the requirements have generally been embraced by New York’s commercial fishermen, who recognize that providing everyone with open access to the fishery would mean, given current harvest quotas, that just about no one would catch enough fish to survive.

While New York took the commercial licensing process to its logical conclusion, other states are still trying to figure out how to best address the issue.  In recent weeks, a controversy has broken out in North Carolina, where officials discovered that, although it issues about 7,000 commercial fishing licenses, only about 3,000 of the licensees are actually selling any fish to dealers. 

There is speculation that the majority of the license buyers are merely trying to escape restrictive recreational bag limits, or are otherwise abusing the license privilege.  Thus, the state is considering changes to the law that would impose qualifications—suggestions include requiring that license holders earn 50% of their income from commercial fishing, provide trip tickets proving that they made at least 36 commercial fishing trips in one year and/or earn no less than $10,000 from commercial fishing—on license holders, to weed out those using the commercial license for an inappropriate purpose.

North Carolina commercial fishermen appear split on the issue. 



It also discloses the fact that about one-third of the licensed “commercial fishermen” who don’t report any annual landings are either actively fishing with commercial gear or harvesting fish in commercial quantities.  While no conclusions were drawn from that fact, it seems obvious that such fishermen were either evading restrictive recreational regulations in order to harvest more fish for personal use or—probably the far more likely scenario—were bypassing licensed fish buyers, and evading both catch and income reporting requirements, by selling their catch illicitly and undercutting the sales of more reputable commercial operators.


About three-quarters of the 5,000 or so license holders allegedly report no landings at all.  A decade ago, Paul Diodati, then the then the director of Massachusetts’ Division of Marine Fisheries, noted that

“The commercial fishery has also changed by attracting thousands of non-traditional participants who are lured by the thought of subsidizing an expensive hobby,”
so-called “recre-mercial fishermen who, like the bluefin tuna fishermen I ran into in my summer job, merely want to underwrite the price of their trips, and don’t need the money to provide family income.


Fishermen I know up in Massachusetts tell me that such legislation has little to no chance of passage. 

That may be a shame.

For as a fisherman wrote in that North Carolina Watermen thread, a more restrictive definition of “commercial fishermen” wouldn’t hurt the people who actually make their living on the water.  Instead,

“bank VPs in Dare County or pharmacists from Kinston will no longer be able to sell their fish.”

And in these days of declining stocks and shrinking quotas, that would not be a bad thing at all.

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