IS IT TIME FOR A "ONE-AND-DONE" RULE IN THE RECREATIONAL STRIPED BASS FISHERY?

 

A number of years ago, my wife, two of our friends and I found ourselves in a boat, with a guide, on Alaska’s Kenai River.

We had hit things just right; the river was filled with king salmon.  While the Alaska Department of Fish and Game estimates that it takes the average angler about 29 hours to put a single king in the boat, we probably weren’t waiting 29 minutes between hookups, with our guide putting us on king after king as we backtrolled big plugs down the river.

I was enjoying the action, and had released a number of salmon before landing a 43-pound fish.  That one went on the ice (there was no maximum size in those days), and after that, my lure stayed out of the water, although there was no sign that the bite was slowing down.

In fact, I would have liked to fish a little more, but the regulations for the river were clear:

“No person, after taking a king salmon 20 inches or longer from the Kenai River, may, on that same day, fish from a boat for any species of fish in the Kenai River downstream from Skilak Lake.”

That rule is reinforced with another requiring that

“Anglers who keep a king salmon 20 inches or longer…must immediately record that harvest.”

Each fishing license includes a page where such recordings are made.

That sort of “one and done” rule on the Kenai strikes a rational balance between the impacts of catch-and-release and catch-and-keep angling on the fish population, without unduly favoring either approach to the fishery.

Although we sometimes try to tell ourselves otherwise—particularly about our own fishing efforts—we all hopefully realize that catch-and-release fishing has some impacts on fish populations, although in many fisheries an angler would have to release quite a few fish before having the same impact as someone putting just on in the cooler.

When fishing for salmon on the Kenai, an angler has to make a choice.  Does he or she keep the first king that is caught, knowing that it might be the only one that takes the hook all day, and then quit fishing?  Or is the fish released, in the hope of enjoying more action, but at the cost of possibly not taking any salmon home?

It’s not always an easy decision.  On our second and last trip on the river, I got carried away by our first-day success and, expecting a repeat of the action we had already enjoyed, brashly announced that I wouldn’t keep another fish unless it was larger than the one I had already taken.  Having made that commitment, I caught a relatively small salmon early and let it go.  But fishing was far slower that day than on our first outing; I spent a most of the rest of the da watching my companions put their fish on ice while I waited and hoped that another king might come along.

Yet it’s a decision that has to be made, because the one thing that an angler can’t do is keep the first fish, then continue to catch and release, causing additional fishing mortality, after that first king is on ice.  And each angler makes it knowing that if the first fish is released, there is a very real possibility that another salmon might not come along that day.

So each person fishing the river must decide, on every fishing day, whether keeping one fish, or possibly catching many fish, will be their goal.

As a result of Alaska’s one-and-done policy on the river, fisheries managers have managed to constrain recreational king salmon landings on the Kenai to an average of 17,500 fish per year.

Yet that sort of one-and-done regulation is rarely encountered outside of Alaska.  In most fisheries, and particularly in saltwater fisheries, anglers can typically put a limit of fish in the box, and then continue fishing, even while using baits and techniques likely to lead to additional discard mortality.

The question that needs to be asked is whether requiring anglers to quit fishing once they have kept their limit of fish would benefit other fish stocks, as it seems to benefit the Kenai’s king salmon.

More particularly, we should ask whether it would benefit the striped bass, given that 48 percent of fishing mortality is attributed to fish that die after release?

The same basic logic would apply; by forcing anglers to make a choice between taking a fish earlier in the trip, and not engaging in catch-and-release once that fish was in the cooler, or releasing fish caught earlier in the session, and taking the chance of not catching a legal fish later in the day, both release mortality and overall fishing mortality would be reduced.

In the case of striped bass, where managers believe that, on average, about 9 percent of released fish don’t survive, putting one bass in the cooler is theoretically equivalent to catching and releasing eleven.  And since, particularly in these days of an overfished stock, catching and releasing 11 legal fish would constitute a pretty good day (because both the catch-and-keep and catch-and-release fishermen would, we hope, release all of their shorts and over-slot fish), a one-and-done rule probably wouldn’t favor one approach over the other. 

Only the anglers who tried to straddle the line, and would keep fishing after a bass was put on ice, would be disadvantaged.

There’s some dispute about how many anglers fall in that latter category.

Tom Fote, the Governor’s Appointee from New Jersey, probably wouldn’t see to much of a problem with a one-and-done restriction, because he’s gone on the record as saying that’s what people are already doing in his home state.  At one meeting of the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, he argued that

“This fishery has completely changed in the last 20 years.  If you look at New Jersey, 20 years ago most of the striped bass fishermen were catch-and-release fishermen.

“They really were not keeping---they would take only one home a week, maybe a few like that, but they were mostly doing catch and release.  That is when our numbers were really high.  When you started cutting down on summer flounder and a few other species where these people could go targeting in May and June and everything like that, they all of a sudden switched to be striped bass fishermen, but they were meat fishermen.

“…A guy or a girl, when they get their fish that they’re going to take home, they go in, they don’t sit there.  A matter of fact, a lot of charterboat captains said as soon as you put your two-fish limit in New Jersey, we’re headed to the dock.  That is really what happens here…

“When I used to go out in 2002, maybe one guy on the boat would keep one fish.  Now you go and they keep eight fish, but they go back to the dock, and that is what they’re doing.  There is not the continuously [sic] catch and release there was a long time ago…  [emphasis added]”

If that’s what’s going on, a one-and-done rule wouldn’t impact the catch-and-keep angler at all.

But that may not be what’s really happening.

Recreational fishermen like to fish.  That’s why, even if they take their bass home, they invest the time and money needed to catching their dinner themselves, rather than buying it at the store, something that would cost far less in both time and money.  And when someone enjoys doing something like fishing, they’re not that likely to quit and go home just because they have a bass in the cooler.  It’s tough to leave fish biting early in the day.

So my own guess, based on the people I know who regularly keep bass, is that most anglers won’t voluntarily stop fishing just because they’ve kept their limit of fish.  That may be particularly true of charter boat fishermen, who pay for a full day and aren’t likely to want to go home right away if they put a bass in the boat within a few minutes of getting started. 

In support of my position, I offer a fishing report from a charter boat that specializes in stripers and fishes out of my local inlet:

“Found a huge pod [of menhaden] right away, holding big fish.  We had non stop action for 2 hours, all fish were between 30 to 49.4 pounds…”

That happened before the slot limit was put in place, when big fish could still be taken, yet the anglers, who from the photos appear to have taken fish home, didn’t just catch their limits and quit, but kept on fishing for a while.  Another report from the same boat, on a different day, said that its fares

“had a super day of bass fishing with about 20 fish to 48 pounds on the bunker pods…We kept a couple of fish for the table and released all others including the 48 pound beauty.”

While the report wasn’t clear about when the fish that were kept were landed, it’s a pretty good bet that they weren’t among the very last fish of the day, and that the anglers who caught them kept on fishing, and releasing fish, after those bass were already on ice.  If that was the case, a one-and-done fishery would probably have prevented at least some release mortality, which can be a particular concern in a bait fishery targeting the largest female striped bass.

Even if none of the bass were badly hooked, which is unlikely, hanging a 48-pound striper vertically from a scale isn’t conducive to that fish’s survival, and likely would have been avoided with a one-and-done rule.

Thus, as the ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board begins to draft a new amendment to its striped bass management plan, a one-and-done provision, similar to the rule governing king salmon on the Kenai River, might be a worthwhile way to limit release mortality without unnecessarily restricting catch-and-release angling.

Whether such a provision should be included in the new amendment remains open to debate.  But if managers are sincere in their desire to reduce release mortality, that debate should, at the least, occur.