THE COST OF NOT CONSERVING FISH STOCKS

I’ve written about it before:  The fact that healthy fishing businesses depend on having healthy fish stocks, and how the loss of once-plentiful fish populations have hurt, and will continue to hurt, the fishing industry.

It seems obvious.  

Yet it’s a message that has been received with a lot of hostility, some from people who are already struggling from the effects of declining fish stocks.

It’s not a message that you see much in the angling media, because it’s not too popular with a lot of their advertisers, who keep trying to convince anglers that all is well, and that regulations that conserve and rebuild fish stocks are not really needed.

Thus, I was both surprised and pleased to read a piece written by outdoor journalist Mike Wright, which was published on the website 27east.com.  It was titled “The Economy of Failed Fisheries,” and recalled days when healthy stocks of cod kept Montauk, New York’s recreational fishing industry humming even in the depths of winter.  Wright wrote

“At all hours of the night, dozens of trucks would be idling in the Viking [party boat fleet’s] parking lot, stuffed with burly, foul-mouthed meat hunters waiting to embark on one, two and three-day journeys to the banks off Cape Cod to load up on months worth of cod fillets.

“In those days cod stocks were still robust and fishermen who shelled out a couple hundred bucks for one of the trips could expect to come home with their giant coolers filled to the brim.  The Viking had two boats running nearly non-stop on day trips and long-range runs to Georges Bank and the ‘Viking Valley of the Giants.’”

I remember those days, although I’ll admit that I left the mid-winter trips to those who needed the cod more than I did.  But I did venture out in the spring, making the 13-hour run on the Viking Starship from Montauk to Georges Bank, where we spent days fishing for what the Viking folks called “whale cod” before heading back to the dock.

It was a good time, but like the big summer cod that we used to see out at Cox’s Ledge, and the late-spring run of pollock off Block Island, it’s something that now only exists in my memories, for as Wright observes,

“That all collapsed during the winters of 1991-92.  The cod simply vanished, and with them went the winter fishery.  Winter party boat fishing trundled along for a few years after that but the crowds steadily dwindled and eventually the boats stopped sailing.”

He notes that the fishery seemed to be making a comeback for a few years, peaking around 2011, but

“that resurgence did not mark the vanguard of a cod resurgence.  Just the opposite, actually.  That little blip of a healthy cod population seems to have been a complete anomaly that has never materialized again—and you can see it in the stolid times at Montauk.”

While there are still some boats that, on some days, sail for Montauk’s winter cod, the cod are few, and fishermen are far from abundant.

Today, what had been a fishing town is slowly transitioning into another tourist hangout, the kind of place where people who pay $100 and more for a pair of pre-torn jeans—because they’d never do the active, outdoor sort of things that would wear honest holes in their pants—are becoming a more important part of the town than the anglers who helped give it birth, and have always been a part of its soul.

Unfortunately, neither Montauk, nor the cod, are unique in that regard. 

As I wrote a few days ago, here on Long Island, and in other places as well, winter flounder used to fill our bays in the spring.  Their arrival—or, more accurately, the arrival of weather that was clement enough to get people out fishing—led to an eruption of anglers who had been bottled up indoors for far too long a winter. 

They exploded out of their homes and down to the docks at places such as Captree State Park, where a long line of moored party boats waited to take them out to spots in Great South Bay where shallow, dark mud bottoms caught the heat of the sun, and inspired the flounder to feed more actively.  

Private boats were also a big part of the action.  By early April, the driver of a car passing over the Robert Moses Bridge, which runs from Bay Shore out to Fire Island, could look to the east and see a mass of fishing boats that stretched from near the base of the bridge out to the north/south-running West Channel, about three miles away.

And out in West Channel, more boats were anchored, changing locations occasionally to take advantage of the flowing tide.

Back in the 1980s, the boats ranged from small rental skiffs and modest outboards to big sportfishermen that, in a couple of months, would be chasing tuna and marlin in the canyons.  Arrayed among them was the party boat fleet, often surrounded by private boats that gave the scene a sort of hen-and-chicks appearance as the private boats crowded the for-hires and tried to take unfair advantage of the professional captains’ knowledge of where fish would be at a particular time and tide.

But the flounder, like the Montauk cod, collapsed by the mid-1990s, and by a decade or so later, almost all of the boats—and the economic boon they provided at that time of the season—were gone.

A few party boats still search for the remaining flounder.  But as I walked the Captree docks in mid-April, maybe a decade ago, I was haunted by how few anglers were there, and by how few boats were sailing.  Where once the parking lot would have been filled with hopeful anglers’ cars, now most spaces are empty.  Today, many boats don’t even bother trying to sail until they can find striped bass and fluke for their fares.

The flounder’s collapse wasn’t unexpected—both anglers and fishery managers could see problems coming for years—but no one was willing to make the sort-term sacrifices needed to keep the fishery alive for the future.  It was all about short term gain.

So today they have nothing at all.

I’m an angler, so I tend to focus on recreational fisheries, but commercial fisheries have long been plagued by the same sort of short-sightedness—and the same sort of loss.

The cod, after all, weren’t driven to collapse by the party and charter boat fleet, but by trawlers, mostly up in New England, who for years fought against any sort of meaningful regulation that might have had a real chance at rebuilding a badly overfished stock.

I was reminded of such attitudes again, just this week, when I attended a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council.  The topic was whelks, a good-sized snail that is often sold as “conch” or “scungilli,” and has gained a new importance as a commercial target, since lobster became scarce in Long Island Sound.

State fishery managers had made a good case that fishing pressure was up, abundance was down, and measures were needed to protect the immature whelks.  They proposed a size limit that did nothing more than let the big snails mature, and have at least one chance to spawn before they were plucked from the water and covered in red sauce or, more likely these days, shipped off to China.

But fishermen were largely, if not unanimously, opposed to new size limits, and questioned the economic impact of the proposed regulations. 

Jim Gilmore, the head of the New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation’s Marine Division, responded by asking what the economic impact of doing nothing, and having whelks disappear, would be, but his question went unanswered by the crowd.

But we know what the answer to his question would be.

The cod have already told us.  So have the flounder.

As Mike Wright wisely observed in 27east, their message is

“a word of warning to keep in mind when one complains about what we see as unnecessarily restrictive limitations on the fish we catch.  There are misfires in quotas, to be sure, but it’s far better to err on the side of caution than to have another stock of fish go the way of the cod.”