A TICKING BOMB

At first glance, it all looks OK.

Here on Long Island, Fire Island Inlet is still filled with boats fishing for fluke on sunny July afternoons.  The artificial reef that New York built just offshore is still be crowded with boats; the state even enhanced the reef, and a number of others, last season, with a sunken vessels and many tons of debris that will provide new fishing places for anglers.

Farther offshore, boats hover above long-sunken wrecks, seeking whatever might hide among their rusting hulls and rotting timbers.

As the waters cooled and autumn settles in, wader-clad surfcasters still dot the shores, and boats still troll slowly along the beaches.

Based on such sights, it would appear that in New York, saltwater fishing is thriving.  But that appearance is probably wrong.

The quality of recreational fishing along New York’s coast has long been in decline.  Although a few species, such as black sea bass and scup, seem to be thriving, the state’s anglers, and its angling industry, have been losing fishing opportunities for at least thirty years.  Now, we face the very real chance that things will get worse, as some of New York’s most important recreational species fall into decline. 

New York is not alone.  What is happening here is happening in neighboring states, throughout the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions.

Some fish, of course, are already gone.

Thirty-five years ago, New York anglers took home an estimated 14.5 million winter flounder in a single season.  Back then, there were no size limits, bag limits or seasons; the unofficial start of the flounder season was March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, although a few party boats would start fishing sooner, and some pier and private boat anglers began roving the bays soon after the ice melted off, whenever the sun was warm enough to make it seem worthwhile.

Last spring, New York anglers caught so few winter flounder that the National Marine Fisheries Service lacked the data they needed to estimate landings.  The official estimate is just 25 fish—yes, 25, where more than 14 million were taken not long ago—but NMFS acknowledges that such estimate is wildly inaccurate.  Even so, we can bet that the total catch was probably well under a thousand, which would l be less than one-hundredth of one percent of what had been landed before.

Coastwide, the news isn’t much better.  1985 saw 32.2 million winter flounder caught along the entire East Coast; last season, the estimate was about 162,000—a 99.5% reduction.  If you take Massachusetts out of the picture—there is still a viable fishery in and around Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay—anglers along the rest of the coast only landed 28,000 winter flounder last year, a 99.9% reduction from what they caught in 1984.

The loss of the winter flounder cost New York’s salt water anglers, and the businesses that support them, the entire month of March and a good part of April, as there isn’t much else to fish for at that time.  It also impacted the fishing in May, when the migration of winter flounder out of the bay and into the ocean gave anglers, and particularly party boat anglers, one last shot at the popular food fish, and in October, November and even December, when many recreational fishermen again used to catch flounder as they returned to the inshore grounds.

Other states, such as Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey, which once had thriving flounder fisheries, are feeling a similar pain.

Other fisheries haven’t collapsed so completely, but are still shadows of what they were three or four decades ago.  At one time, New York and its neighboring states hosted a year-round cod fishery.  Writer Al Ristori recently described how it was just forty years ago.

“Then there were the cod.  At Freeport, the Capt. Al (now sailing out of Pt. Lookout) reported fishing had been ‘hot and cold’ all week though Wednesday saw between 30 and 40 cod come over the rail with several fish in the 40 lb. catch included in the catch.  Blue Fin II…fished an offshore wreck on Dec. 16 that produced 18 cod for 19 men with four over 40 pounds and the pool fish of over 50 pounds.  A little further east, the Capt. Scotty from Captree was fishing open bottom…to catch over 20 cod from 20-40 lbs. that Wednesday.”

During the height of winter, an angler might still pull a cod or two from the waters southeast of Block Island or out at Cox’s Ledge.  Sometimes—although it never really happened last year—a boat, or even the fleet, still happens across a concentration of fish and everyone limits out, mostly catching little “market” cod, and a pool fish that often don’t break 15 pounds.  But the South Shore of Long Island is largely dead, and the days when party boats loaded with fares sailed from New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island ports all twelve months of the year, and reliably caught cod even during the height of summer, are long gone. 

Also gone is the winter fishery for ling and whiting, more properly known as red and silver hake, in New York Bight.  At its height, the fishery went on both day and night, with party boats making up almost all of the fleet.  Ristori describes that fishing, too, saying

“[The Long Island Fisherman magazine was] reporting ‘terriffic’ ling and whiting fishing.  ‘Catches run 50 or 60 fish per angler with 95% of the catch made up of whiting running 1-4 lbs.”

He ruefully notes that

“One angler’s catch of whiting in those days probably exceeds all of what is now hooked throughout the year on bottom fishing boats.”

That observation is probably true.  NMFS harvest estimates show that in 1981, anglers in the Mid-Atlantic, but almost all from New York and New Jersey, landed about 744,000 whiting, and by then the fishery was already well into its downward spiral.  1982, when about 595,000 fish were landed, was the last good year.  The bottom fell out after that, with the catch estimate for 2017 just 82 fish (although, once again, the data is so scarce that the estimate is not reliable).

With the decline of the cod and the loss of the whiting, fishermen and that businesses that support them could scratch most of December, January and February off their calendars, too.

I won’t even describe what has happened offshore.  I’ve been chasing shark and tuna and such since the ‘70s, and watched the bluewater action sprint downhill, too; bigeye tuna and mako sharks are both in serious trouble.  That doesn’t affect most anglers, who stick close to shore, but it does take another option away from the for-hire fleet, and hurts the tackle shops and gas docks, too, because fishing offshore is expensive in terms of both fuel and gear.  There are also a lot fewer party boat tuna trips being offered these days.

So New York anglers have seen their fishery, which used to provide pretty good action throughout the year, whittled down to perhaps seven months, and some of those are not too productive. 

Their summer season is built mostly around fluke (summer flounder), with black sea bass and scup in supporting roles, a few bluefish and, along most of the coast, a late June/early July run of larger striped bass.  Fluke season closes at the end of September, at which point striped bass and bluefish, along with some tautog (“blackfish”), support the great majority of anglers who fish from private boats or from shore; those three fish support a good chunk of the for-hire fleet, too.

Thus, the complex of fish that supports the recreational fishery has shrunk, in terms of both species and time.  And it seems that there may be a ticking time bomb that could blow apart most of the supports that remain.

Right now, anglers in the northeast and mid-Atlantic are waiting for the release of benchmark stock assessments for both striped bass and summer flounder, the two most important recreational fish in the region.  Such release is being delayed by the current government shutdown, but will happen eventually, and when it does, the news may not be good.

There are already a lot of rumors circulating around the striped bass assessment; while nothing is certain at this point, it appears that the stock is overfished and that overfishing is occurring along the coast (although perhaps not in Chesapeake Bay).  At the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, managers are already debating whether they ought to rebuild the stock and address such overfishing, assuming such problems exist, or whether they should rewrite the management plan to redefine what “overfishing” and an “overfished stock” mean, and so tell the world that the current stock size and harvest rate are not really bad at all.

If they do that, it will reduce the number of older, larger, more fecund fish in the spawning stock, and make the stock more vulnerable to collapse.  But it will allow folks to kill more bass today.

And the bomb will keep ticking along…

There are also problems with summer flounder.  The population experienced at least six consecutive years of below-average spawning success; it has, as a result, declined, to the point that managers feared that it could become overfished.  Remedial measures were put in place, and hopefully have done some good.  If they have, and if recruitment has improved, the stock should begin to rebuild.  But if that’s not the case, the benchmark assessment may tell us that the stock has become overfished.  If that occurs, a rebuilding plan will have to be put in place; any such plan would probably further restrict landings.

That won’t go over well with some fishermen, and any such plan will be opposed by many in the fishing industry.  At that point, do fishery managers make a real effort to rebuild the stock, knowing that doing so will cause economic distress?  Or do they skirt as close to the edge of the law as they can, and try to minimize additional restrictions, even if taking that course might put the fish at further risk?

Already, here in New York, summer flounder landings fell from nearly 1.2 million fish in 2017 to about 0.56 million fish last season.  That’s a 53% drop in harvest in just one year, even though anglers were able to keep more fish, and enjoyed a longer season, in 2018. 

The drop is largely attributable to anglers making far fewer fishing trips during the 2018 season.  Thus, managers are faced with a chicken-and-egg situation.  Were fewer fish caught because anglers fished less, or did anglers fish less because there weren’t enough fluke to justify leaving the dock?

If the answer is the latter, the economic impact of not rebuilding the stock will probably be far more severe than the impacts of strict regulations.

Simultaneous cutbacks in both the striped bass and summer flounder harvests would probably have a significant short-term impact on the recreational fishing industry.  But those aren’t the only key species with problems.

For many years, bluefish have been the “Plan B,” the backup species that anglers—and captains—fall back on when they can’t find their primary targets.  But over the last year or two, finding bluefish has often been hard.  The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council will update the bluefish stock assessment this summer.  If the update brings some bad news, as it very possibly will, we might find that new regulations are needed for bluefish as well.

It will take time to put any new rules into effect.  However, it is very possible that we might see new, more restrictive regulations for striped bass, bluefish and summer flounder in 2020.

If that happens, the bomb that’s currently ticking might well go off, and change the face of New York’s recreational fishery.

However, if such regulations are needed, and aren’t put in place, the bomb will still explode as fish populations decline to lows that haven’t been seen in decades.  If that should occur, the damage will probably be far worse, and last far longer, than anything caused by new rules.

Remember the winter flounder.