TODAY'S REALITY

A couple of nights ago, I attended my fishing club’s annual awards dinner.  It’s always a good time. 

We sit around, have a few drinks, eat raw oysters and clams, and spend the evening talking about boats and fish and people we knew.  At some point during the night, folks hand out awards for the biggest fish caught over the past season.

There are a lot of very good anglers in the club, which includes a nice mix of younger, aggressive fishermen and older, more experienced hands.  They fish from a mix of boats.  Some prefer traditional flybridge-style sportfishermen, some like downeaster-type boats, while others run fast center consoles that have enough speed and hold enough fuel to fish distant canyons in a single long day.

It’s a combination of boats and people that pretty much assures that if there are any decent fish within 100—maybe 150—miles of the South Shore of Long Island, one of the members is likely to find them and put a few in the boat.

In past years, they’ve caught some impressive fish, and there were some nice fish this year, too.  One was a striped bass well over 50, another a fluke over 12.  A sea bass weighed more than five pounds.  But what really stood out weren’t the fish that were weighed in, but the fish that weren’t.

For example, there was only one winter flounder.  For the whole year.  And it weighed only a pound and a half.  I’m not going to rehash the details of the flounder collapse one more time; I’ve done that enough times before.  But just let that sink in for a while:  An entire club—about 100 members—managed to land just one, single winter flounder throughout the entire 2018 season.

We used to bring them aboard two at a time.

They used to be the one fish that every generation shared.  Growing up, we caught them off docks and from shore, when we were still too young to run our own boats.  And old men, too arthritic or too unsteady to get out on the water, could still sit on the bank in the sun and bring home a flounder or two for dinner.

But that is something we’ve lost, and will almost certainly never have again.  The younger folks—todays kids, and those who won’t be born for some decades more—have had a bit of their heritage stolen away, and perhaps the greatest tragedy is that they will never know, and never appreciate, just how much that theft really cost them.

None of our local offshore fish have suffered as badly as the winter flounder has.  However, as the awards were handed out, it was clear that fishing for blue water species has entered a real decline.

There were no mako sharks weighed in at all.  The big fish are popular with many club members, who value them both for their fight and as food.  Over the years, members put a lot of quality makos on the dock, including a club record fish that weighed 436 pounds.  But as the North Atlantic population of makos experienced continued overfishing, and the stock itself became overfished, the number of large makos caught fell into steep decline. 

Long Island’s mako shark fishery became largely dependent upon immature fish that weighed less than 200 pounds, so when the National Marine Fisheries Service imposed an 83-inch minimum size—about a 230 pound fish—for makos early last year, legal fish became hard to come by.  

Given how badly overfished the stock has become, things probably won’t get much better in the next twenty years.

Tuna aren’t doing much better.

Bluefin were always the tuna traditionally targeted in the northeast.  They were available close to shore, and were caught in abundance for many, many years before the canyon tuna fishery ever began.  It was the bluefin, and not the yellowfin or bigeye, that gave rise to the many tuna clubs that sprung up from New Jersey on into New England.  And bluefin came in all sizes, from small but abundant “school” fish to “giants” of more than 1,000 pounds (our club record  went 902).  On my very first school tuna trip, just four anglers landed more than a dozen fish, almost within sight of shore.

But for all of 2018, club members weighed in only two fish, with the largest just 145.

The bigeye tuna awards told the same kind of story.  I was sitting next to a member with 40 years in the fishery, and when he heard that the first place bigeye weighed only 112 pounds, he just shook his head, saying “That’s really small.”  It was, compared to fish we caught thirty years ago, when it usually took a bigeye ofver 150 to win even a weekend contest, much less an annual award.  

But bigeye, too, are overfished and suffering from overfishing, and things probably won’t get better at any time soon.

And yellowfin?  All I can say is that, after the first-place fish of 57 pounds was announced, one of the folks at my table said “That used to be a throwback fish.” 

When I first started fishing offshore from my own boat, rather than hiring charters, I owned a little 20-foot center console powered by a single 115 horsepower outboard—hardly a distant-waters rig.  We couldn’t yet afford offshore gear, and trolled for tuna with the same rods we used for striped bass and bluefish inshore.  Yet my very first yellowfin weighed 67 pounds, my second an even 90.  At the time they were caught, those were average-sized fish, not worthy of any prize.

Today, on Long Island, they’d be trophies.

While yellowfin don’t seem to be in the same kind of trouble as bigeyes, shrinking size and declining abundance are sure signs that something is wrong.

And then there are “longfin” albacore.  They used to be pests in the canyons, fish that often came four or five—or more—at a time, slashing at every lure in the pattern and making a mess of the cockpit when everyone’s sights were set on bigeye or marlin and not on little, 30-pound “penguins.”  But this year, when the awards were read out, there was not a single albacore caught by anyone in the club.

And that, I’m afraid, reflects today’s reality.

We inherited vital, abundant fisheries from generations now gone to their graves.  Over the course of our lives, we succeeded as fishermen, pounding flounder in the bays, killing sharks for tournament prizes, harrying tuna out on “the Edge,” eighty or one hundred miles from shore, where North America’s very foundations tail off to the abyssal plain.

But we failed as stewards, and plundered the waters that we will pass down to those who must live here when we are gone.  We stole their legacy, and their lives will be poorer for what we have taken, and failed to restore.

That, too, is today’s reality.  

We should be ashamed.