My
fishing seasons begin bright with hope and filled with expectations.
Last year’s mistakes and
missed opportunities have been recalled and dissected all winter; plans have
been laid to assure better outcomes next time. And those next times are coming
soon. The marina has promised that, sometime later this week, my boat will go
into the water, and I’m caught up in an almost childlike anticipation.
And then my adult side kicked
in.
It’s hard not to note that
it’s the middle of May, and my boat still sits dry in the boatyard, surrounded
by a legion of others. That’s something new.
Back in the 1980s and ‘90s,
we tried to get our boats into the water by March, when the ice was gone from
the bay and winter flounder had started to stir. Back then, St. Patrick’s Day
marked the unofficial start of the flounder season, and everyone tried to get
out for a shot at the first fresh fish of the year.
But flounder populations started to fall in the 1980s. When
managers here in New York tried to halt the decline with more restrictive regulations,
the recreational fishing industry pushed back. The party boats argued that
their clients must maintain the “perception” that they could bring home a load
of fish, even if they usually didn’t, while the tackle shops said that
flounders were the fish that first brought customers into their stores each
spring, and so remained important to their businesses, even if there weren’t
many around.
Regulations tough enough to protect the fish were thus never adopted, and
now the flounder are just about gone. In March and April of 1989,
New York anglers brought more than 1,500,000 of them home; in 2017, they
kept around 650.
Cod are just about gone, too. There are fewer red hake (we call them “ling”) on the wrecks, and the April mackerel run doesn’t run any more. There are so few
fish around in the early season that there’s no longer much of a need to put
the boat in before May.
And even May fishing seems to
be under siege.
Right now, we can still find some striped bass. This year, there
should be a lot of small ones around, ten-pound-class fish from a good spawn in 2011, and a bunch of real runts from 2015. But the big, fecund females that produce the most, and the
most viable, eggs will be scarce. The last big year class spawned before 2011
was produced in 2003, and its abundance has been whittled away by years of
fishing pressure. Older fish, from the big 1993, 1996 and 2001 year classes,
have been subject to even more years of harvest, and are even harder to find.
A recent stock assessment update revealed that the striped bass stock is very nearly overfished.
Despite that fact, and the many recent below-average spawns—2012 was the worst ever recorded—the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) is thinking about
changing the “reference points” used to manage the stock. Some
ASMFC members have already proposed an increase in the allowable fishing
mortality rate and a reduction of the spawning stock biomass target. If such
changes are made, even fewer of the old, fecund females will be left in the
stock to ensure the bass’ future, and get the stock through those times when
adverse environmental conditions hamper spawning success.
Yet, although I enjoy fishing for striped bass, I spend most of
May fishing for weakfish, a beautiful and iconic species that has entranced
generations of Long Island anglers. In recent years, I’ve caught very few; the population is badly
depleted. Increased natural mortality, from causes unknown, seems to
be a big part of the problem. In 2009, biologists suggested that a complete
prohibition on harvest would help the stock recover should natural mortality
decline, but ASMFC decided to allow
continued harvest. Nearly a decade later, there are few signs that a
recovery will occur.
Still, when the weakfish are
scarce, there are usually bluefish. Blues are the traditional day-saver, the
fish that May anglers can always catch when they can’t catch anything else.
Last year, though, there weren’t many blues in the bay. A stock
assessment released in 2015 indicated that abundance had declined to
85% of the target level, and some anglers, who are seeing fewer
fish, have expressed concern. Even so, the ASMFC and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery
Management Council (MAFMC) have initiated a process that could further reduce bluefish abundanceby
reallocating fish currently caught and released by recreational anglers, to the
commercial sector.
And then there’s summer
flounder.
Our season opened on May 4th this year, and with little else to
fish for, anglers are already focusing most of their efforts on whatever summer
flounder there are, even though at least six consecutive years of poor spawning success has
caused a decline in summer flounder abundance.
That decline has been significant. In 2016, the MAFMC’s Science and Statistical Committee warned that
“the stock biomass is dangerously close to being overfished, which
could happen as early as next year if increased efforts to curb
fishing mortality are not undertaken.” Fishery managers heeded that warning and
reduced the summer flounder catch limit for 2017.
But just one year later, both the MAFMC and ASMFC chose to
ignore the advice of the MAFMC’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Monitoring
Committee, which recommended that recreational regulations not be
relaxed in 2018, fearing that New Jersey’s failure to comply with ASMFC’s summer flounder management
plan, along with changes to recreational effort estimates, have added
significant management uncertainty to the recreational fishery.
So the future of the summer
flounder appears cloudy as well.
Going into this season, I
can’t help tempering my anticipation with the fear that the health of our fish
stocks is headed downhill, knowing that even if the fishing this year isn’t
very good, it might be the best fishing we’ll see for a while.
At the same time, I caught my
first fish in 1956, and one of the advantages of spending years on the water is
that you gain a bit of perspective.
While the immediate future of
some of our fish stocks looks grim, I know from experience that things can also
get better.
I fished through the collapse of the striped bass stock in the late 1970s and
1980s. I also fished through its recovery to its peak of recent abundance a
decade after that. So I know that declines in abundance can be reversed.
Striped bass isn’t the only stock that I’ve seen rebuild. Two or
three decades ago, summer flounder, scup and black sea bass were
all badly overfished, and bluefish were getting scarce. But those fish, too, were
restored to abundance by hard work, good fisheries laws and effective
regulation.
I’ve learned that good
fishing and good management go hand in hand, and that the best way to get good
fishery management is to stand up and demand it. If anglers don’t want more
striped bass killed, or their bluefish allocations cut, they need to turn out
for the hearings that will be coming up, contact their state fishery managers
and their representatives at the MAFMC and ASMFC, and make it clear that such
changes are bad for the fish, and for fishermen as well.
And anglers need to make sure that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens),
the law that rebuilt the summer flounder and bluefish, the black sea bass and
scup, remains strong and effective. They must resist the blandishments of the
snake-oil salesmen who support legislation such as the Modern Fish Act or, worse, H.R. 200, and would trade the future health of fish stocks for
a bigger short-term kill.
Fish populations have gone
downhill before. Bad management decisions have also been made.
But Magnuson-Stevens, and
dedicated fishery managers, have a solid track record of rebuilding fish
stocks. So long as we keep that law strong, and insist that managers focus on
long-term abundance, not on short-term landings, the problems we face going
into this season—which are very real—are problems that can be solved.
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This essay first appeared in “From the Waterfront,” the blog
of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be found at http://conservefish.com/blog/
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