2020: APPROACHING THE TIPPING POINT FOR INSHORE FISHERIES

I’ve asked the question before.

Will there come a point where fish stocks decline to a level that makes anglers decide to stay home?  And if there is, how long will it take to reach it?

Could it happen as soon as next year? 

Is it already happening now?

I started wondering that a few weeks ago, when I was invited to ride along with a group of anglers, press and other folks that New York’sGovernor, Andrew Cuomo, put together, to celebrate the placement of additionalmaterial on the artificial reef that lies a couple of miles south of the FireIsland lighthouse.  We boarded a boat at Captree State Park, and ran out to the ocean through Fire Island Inlet.

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon.  Only a few clouds drifted across an otherwise clear sky; the temperature was in the 80s, the winds refreshing and light.  It was, in short, the sort of day that had inspired hordes of casual anglers to come out and fish for as long as I’ve lived on the South Shore of Long Island.  

On a typical August afternoon, boats transiting Fire Island Inlet are faced with a virtual slalom course, where private fishing boats, party boats, cruisers, partiers and jet skis—and even the occasional kayak—clog the marked channel and force any responsible boater to throttle down while wending a way through the assembled vessels.

It gets bad enough that when I’m returning home from offshore, even when the ocean is unkind and I’ve spent the last forty miles white-knuckling my way back to the inlet through sheets of spray, I feel most uncomfortable, and most at risk, once I’m back inside the sea buoy and running the last few miles back to my dock through the crowded inlet and bay.

But that Saturday afternoon, despite near-perfect weather, the inlet was largely empty.

Yes, there were the usual jet skis speeding around, and there was a small flotilla of pleasure boats anchored up at the beach at Democrat Point, Fire Island’s westernmost end.  There were some beachgoers' boats anchored off the Sore Thumb and Oak Beach on the other side of the inlet as well, and a few others joyriding around.  But fishermen were notably absent.  I’m not sure that I saw more than two dozen or so private fishing boats in the more than two miles of inlet that stretches from the Robert Moses Bridge to the open Atlantic.

It wasn’t weather that kept the boats at the dock, and August 3^rd isn’t a holiday weekend; that early in the month, students are still home from college, and the back-to-school shopping hasn’t kicked in.  About the only reasonable explanation for the lack fo fishermen was the notable lack of fish.

The August fishery around Fire Island is all about fluke—or, more properly, summer flounder.  They’re the fish that drives summer bait and tackle sales, and brings out the family fishermen who don’t want to go through the trouble of fishing offshore, even on nearby wrecks, but only seek to drift through the inlet and bay.  Typically, the casual anglers pay little attention to time, current or tide, but reliably leave the dock around 11:00 a.m., and come home in time for dinner.  Most of them hope to bring home a keeper or two, often fail in that ambition, but still keep heading out, just wanting to have a good time.

The problem is that when you go out fishing, it’s hard to have a good time if you don’t catch very much, something that’s particularly true when you have short attention span children on board who expect angling action to be as consistent as pop-ups in a video game.  Lately, the fluke fishing around Fire Island, and on most of the rest of Long Island, hasn't been anywhere close to that good.

That doesn’t mean that a decent angler, or a good party boat captain, can’t find a few fish; in most cases, they can and will.  It does mean that for causal weekend anglers, who give little thought to when or why fish are likely to bite, the odds of accidentally catching a decent fish or two start getting forbiddingly high--high enough that more and more of the weekend crowd doesn’t fish too much any more.

Although we won’t have effort figures for Wave 4 (July/August) 2019 until mid-October, effort figures compiled by the National Marine Fisheries Service show that, during all of the years between 2003 and 2017, the number of private boat recreational trips made annually in New York hovered between about 2,000,000 and 3,000,000.  In 2018, for the first time since NMFS began making annual effort estimates in 1981, that number fell below 1,200,000.

Maybe that’s just an aberration.  Maybe the estimate is wrong.  Maybe the effort numbers will pop right back up in 2019.

But from what I’m seeing on the water, I’m not so sure that’s going to happen.

According to a benchmark stock assment released last spring, is well above the biomass threshold that designates an overfished stock.

On the other hand, there aren’t all that many fluke available to anglers, due to consistent below-average spawning success since 2011.  Biologists aren’t sure what is causing such poor recruitment, but the population reached its near-term peak in 2003, at a little over 69,000 metric tons; since then, it has declined, dropping to about 44,500 metric tons in 2017.  And fishing could get even worse, for as the stock assessment notes,

“declines in survey indices suggest that current mortality from all sources is greater than current recruitment inputs to the stock.  If recruitment improves, current catches may allow the stock to increase, but if recruitment remains low or decreases further, then reductions in catch will be necessary.  [emphasis added]”

A further decline in the fluke population would give weekend anglers even less reason to leave the dock.  And even if recruitment improves, it will take at least four years, and in some cases five, for the fish to grow large enough to meet New York’s 19-inch minimum size.

There aren’t a lot of fish around to take up the slack left behind by declining summer flounder abundance.

As we all know by now, striped bass are both overfished and subject to overfishing.  I went down to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Summer Meeting last week, to sit in on the striped bass management board’s deliberations.  It looks as if it will take at least an 18% reduction in fishing mortality just to get overfishing under control; at the meeting, the management board was informed that it would almost certainly take even greater reductions to rebuild the stock within ten years, as required by the management plan.

So don’t expect an abundance of bass to make up for a shortage of fluke, as they did two decades ago.

While I was at the ASMFC meeting, I was passing time speaking to a Commission staffer, who mentioned that an update to the bluefish stock assessment, which will be released in September, suggests that bluefish are also overfished, so don’t expect the once-ubiquitous bluefish to take the place of the missing fluke and stripers, because in many times and places, bluefish are missing, too.

So if you’re an inshore fisherman, the old standbys—blues, bass and fluke—aren't likely to keep you busy at any time soon.  There won’t be any winter flounder to be caught in the spring or in the fall, and although blackfish (a/k/a “tautog”) will be around, they remain overfished in New York waters; up in Long Island Sound, the ASMFC will let overfishing continue until 2029, and no one is even trying to predict when the stock might be rebuilt.  Nobody is catching spring mackerel in Long Island Sound, and herring are scarce on the winter piers.

Inshore fishing is, in short, pretty bad through most of the year.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any bright spots.  Black sea bass remain very abundant, particularly on the eastern part of Long Island, although many of the fish caught are very small.  Once the season has been open for a few weeks, even good wreck fishermen often have problems finding fish over two pounds, and sometimes can’t even put together a limit of barely-legal 15-inchers.

Scup are abundant, too, but much of that abundance is regional, with Long Island Sound and the East End seeming more fish than most of the South Shore.

Beyond that, there are signs that weakfish might be returning from the dead.  Here on the South Shore of Long Island, it seems as if there have been two better year classes.  One consists of fish in the 3 to 5 pound class, while the other consists of younger individuals that don’t yet meet the state’s 16-inch minimum size.  While the abundance doesn’t come close to matching the big year classes of the early 1970s, or even the early 1990s, the fact that weakfish seem to be showing any signs of life is a good sign.

In the ocean, a growing abundance of chub mackerel and red hake (locally called “ling”) are keeping many anglers active.  Ling are a traditional part of Long Island’s fishery, although they have historically been targeted during the winter, usually as a substitute for or an adjunct to cod.  They’re a good-tasting fish, but the meat tends to be soft and falls apart easily, particularly if the fish aren’t iced down immediately after being caught.  In the end, they’re more sought-after for fish cakes than for fillets.

Chub mackerel, on the other hand, have historically been an irregular visitor to Long Island.  But in recent years, perhaps as a result of a warming ocean, they have become far more abundant, with big schools sometimes found throughout New York’s inshore ocean.  Yet, while they’re abundant, most anglers don't eat tham.  One seafood website describes the flesh as “red” and “oily,” with a “rich and strong” flavor, which doesn’t recommend them to people used to white, mild-tasting fish such as cod, flounder and striped bass.  

So as we look ahead to next season, we’re probably looking at a year when striped bass, fluke and bluefish will be harder to find than they are today, with more restrictive regulations likely to be placed on the bass stock, and possibly, if not probably, on other species as well.  There will be no winter flounder, not too many blackfish, and few Atlantic mackerel or herring.

There should be lots of scup and black sea bass, and probably good numbers of ling and chub mackerel.  There might be a few weakfish, but inshore, that will be just about it.

The question is, will scup, black sea bass and the other odds and ends be enough to keep the inshore fishery alive?

Will people be willing to make the sacrifices needed to rebuild depleted populations, or will they fight regulations and, in that way, make it even more likely that the inshore fishery will keep headed downhill?

And will 2020 be the year when things get so bad that most boats just stay tied to their docks?

Time will tell.