MARINE RECREATIONAL FISHERIES: THE CLOSING WINDOW

 

Last Tuesday, I attended a meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council.  The meeting was relatively brief, and although it touched on other matters, its main focus was on possible 2024 regulations for the recreational scup and summer flounder fisheries. 

While everyone agreed on a single set of scup regulations, three options for summer flounder had received serious consideration from stakeholders.  Two would include a 19-inch size limit and a three-fish bag, with seasons that spanned either 126 or 132 days.  The third would increase the minimum size to 19 ½ inches and, by doing so, also allow a 4-fish bag and a 213-day season that ran from April 1 through October 31.

The fact that increasing the size limit by just one-half of an inch would permit an 81-day extension of the season—perhaps, for practical purposes, closer to a 45- or 50-day extension, as just about no fluke are caught through most of April and few in late October, but still a significant increase—and add an additional fish to the bag is a pretty good indication of how few fish exceeding 19 ½ inches are being caught these days.  Going to the larger fish would undoubtedly lead to many more throwbacks, and a lot of unhappy anglers. 

Nonetheless, it was the option preferred by most of the for-hire industry, by the tackle shops, and by quite a few anglers, too, garnering about 450 first- and second-choice votes in a survey that reflected the opinions of about 850 anglers and about 50 members of the for-hire fleet.  The two primary 19-inch options each attracted about 400 first- and second-choice votes each, and a few other 19-inch options attracted far smaller shares of the angling population.

I was a little surprised by the outcome, since just a few weeks before, it seemed that a reluctant consensus was forming around one of the 19-inch options, with the general sentiment being that the summer flounder fishing didn’t really heat up until later in May, and that a 19 ½-inch fluke might be hard to find along much of the New York coast.  However, many members of the for-hire fleet did express a reluctance to sacrifice any days of the season, and asked the Department of Environmental Conservation to consider other options that might extend season length, perhaps by adopting a 2-fish bag in the earliest part of the year.

It turned out that a split-season bag limit didn’t achieve the required reduction in summer flounder landings, and perhaps because of that, the industry—and, apparently, many anglers—decided that a longer season was more important than a smaller size limit, and asked the DEC to adopt the 19 ½-inch option, saying that a shortened season would harm the state’s angling industry.

It’s not yet clear that the state will abide by their wishes.  The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has placed New York and Connecticut in a single region for the purposes of managing summer flounder.  Both states must agree on a single set of regulations, and it is not at all certain that Connecticut will agree to the higher minimum size.  But whether or not Connecticut ultimately concurs, it is difficult not to sympathize with the angling industry, because if the boats can’t sail, and anglers can’t fish, for summer flounder during much of the year, they have little else to fish for.  That’s particularly true for boats and anglers that fish in the bays, and don’t venture into the ocean.

It wasn’t always that way.

My wife and I moved to Long Island in December 1983; I’ve kept a boat of some sort in Long Island’s waters for the past 40 years.  Back then, the fishing season never really stopped.

If the season had a beginning, it was around the first weekend in March, when a handful of party boats began fishing for winter flounder.  A few private boats, and a few anglers fishing from bulkheads and piers, also got early starts.  While they usually didn’t catch much at first, by St. Patrick’s Day, the unofficial first day of the flounder season, just about all of the party boats sailed with good loads of anglers.  The fishing hit its stride in April, continued strong through the end of May, and never really stopped altogether, with a few flounder being picked all summer in the cooler water near the inlets.  In the fall, flounder fishing began to improve late in September, and continued well into December.

In 1984, the first year that I fished Great South Bay, New York’s recreational fishermen caught and took home nearly 14.5 million winter flounder.  By 2023, that number had dropped to an estimated 535, although so few were landed, and there is so much uncertainty in the estimate, that there is just as good a chance that the actual number was anywhere between 0 and 1,680.

Whatever it was, the flounder are pretty much gone.  Party boat passengers no longer pursue them.  Nor do most shore or private-boat fishermen.  The revenues that they generate for tackle shops is somewhere very close to nil—so close that, when I tried to buy some bait last April for a quick offshore  cod trip, I couldn’t even find a pack of frozen clams; the shops said that they wouldn’t stock any bait until May.

Thus, with the loss of winter flounder, a month and a half was chopped off the start of the fishing season.  More time was chopped off at its end.

That was a big hit for the industry to absorb.  Winter flounder were once one of the most important recreational species in New York’s waters, and shops and for-hire boats took a hit when they disappeared.  If flounder were the only fish to decline, it would have been bad enough.  However, they weren’t alone.

By the winter of 1983-84, my first winter spent on Long Island, another significant fishery was just about gone.  New York’s waters had long hosted a good population of whiting (more properly called “silver hake”).  In the winter, they would come close to shore.  On the East End, around Montauk, big “baseball bat” whiting could sometimes be caught from the beach, and smaller fish could often be picked up on South Shore beaches, after they chased small bait so aggressively during the night that they found themselves on the sand, providing food for any person—or gull—that passed by.  But the real concentration of whiting occurred around New York Harbor, where anglers caught them at night from places like the Coney Island Pier.  Party boats sailed at all hours, loaded with anglers who, through the 1970s, regularly brought home buckets of fish.

Today, whiting are so scarce inshore (they are still abundant in deep offshore waters) that the National Marine Fisheries Service’s recreational landings data website doesn’t even include them in the standard list of species; to find them, a special inquiry must be made.  If you take the time to do that, you’ll learn that some whiting are still caught off New York in some years—perhaps 3,200 in 2021, but none the year after—but there are no longer enough to support a directed fishery, much less one the size of the fishery that once existed in the New York Bight.

So another few weeks were chopped off the fishing year.

But whiting were mostly a West End occurrence;  for most of Long Island, back in those days, there were cod.  By the 1980s, cod were starting to fade, but the fishery was still viable.  Some party boats regularly sailed throughout the winter from South Shore ports as well as from Montauk, and some private boats sailed as well—at least through November and early December.  I still recall fishing a tournament appropriately called the “Codfish Chiller” sometime around Thanksgiving in 1984 or ’85.  It was miserable fishing from a small boat at that time of year, but it nonetheless kept the shops open selling clams and terminal gear.  The summer fishery, which was concentrated on the East End, was more pleasant, and saw both private and for-hire boats sail to wrecks and to Rhode Island’s Cox’s Ledge, where anglers regularly caught quality cod—a very few would break 50 pounds, but 20s were common—while fishing in shirtsleeve weather.

But the summer fishery died long ago, and the winter fishery is on life support, taking away another important species from the party boats and giving them little to fish for during the season.

Tautog (“blackfish”), another species once important to the saltwater angling industry, has seen its season shrink as well.  Once caught from late April through late November along much of the coastline, and throughout the winter in some deep-water spots, it is now targeted for only a couple months in the fall; an April season exists, but produces few fish.

What that all means is that the window for successful sportfishing—and for making money in the sportfishing industry—is steadily closing.  What was once a year-round season now begins in early May and ends—for most people—at some point in November, although the striped bass fishery on western Long Island can continue into December, and the party boat fishery for black sea bass and such runs through the end of the year.

What may be more important is that, as the season shrinks, the number of species available to anglers is shrinking, too. 

Forty years ago, striped bass were in serious trouble, weakfish were beginning to wane, and the live-fish market was beginning to impact the tautog, but otherwise, there was a wide array of fish available to New York’s anglers, whether they fished from shore, from their own boats, or from for-hire vessels.  Today, that is no longer the case.

Winter flounder are gone.  Summer flounder have experienced below-average recruitment for well over a decade; although the stock is not overfished, at the end of 2022, spawning stock biomass stood at 83% of its target level, so neither are the fish abundant.  Tautog are mixed, with the New Jersey-New York Bight population still overfished, but the Long Island Sound stock recovering well, although still below the biomass target.  However, Atlantic mackerel, once a private- and party boat favorite that flooded New York’s waters during the spring, have declined below the biomass threshold, and are now overfished.

Of the inshore sportfish, striped bass are overfished, and have been experiencing poor recruitment in every spawning area except the Hudson River; even there, the 2023 juvenile abundance index was the lowest since 1985.  Bluefish are no longer overfished, but remain in a rebuilding plan, with spawning stock biomass at the end of 2022 just 60% of target.  Weakfish are showing some slight signs of recovery and improved recruitment, but spawning stock biomass remains far, far below the threshold that denotes an overfished stock.

The fish that once supported the winter fishery are also in bad shape.  The newly-recognized Southern New England stock of cod is overfished, and overfishing is still occurring.  The whiting are gone from the New York Bight.  The status of mid-Atlantic red hake is unknown, but the last stock assessment update indicated that biomass was the lowest recorded in a time series going back to 2015.  Atlantic herring, that once drew a surprising number of anglers to local piers during the cold months, are now overfished and not common inshore.

The only two species that are in really good shape are scup and black sea bass.  However, recreational fishermen have exceeded their annual catch limit for both species in each of the past three years, so there is no room for any expansion of either fishery.

And so fishermen, and the recreational fishing industry, are trapped not only by a shrinking season, but by a shrinking number of available species that limits their alternatives when regulations shorten seasons or fish fail to show up in a particular location.  Things have gotten so bad in New York that some for-hire operators are now asking the state to extend the winter flounder season, despite the collapsed state of the flounder stock, in order to provide more opportunities for their customers to take a fish home.

Things aren’t much better anywhere else; I only focus on New York because it’s the fishery that I know best.  In North Carolina, the local Albemarle-Roanoke stock of striped bass is in dismal condition, the recreational southern flounder season runs for only two weeks, and big bluefish are no longer regular visitors to the late autumn beach.  In the Gulf of Mexico, overfishing is driving down cobia numbers, greater amberjack are overfished, and the season for overfished gag grouper was recently shortened by more than half.  In the Pacific, a warming ocean has pushed many salmon runs into a steep decline.

On every coast, the window of angling opportunity, both for fishermen and for the businesses they support, continues to narrow.  In many cases, such as that of New York’s summer flounder, angling businesses feel forced to choose between unpalatable management alternatives, and continuously seek the suite of rules that will minimize income loss.

Still, as bad as things seem to be, most such businesses still fail to pursue the one course of action that might offer some hope for things to get better.  Focused on minimizing their short-term pain, they fail to embrace the sort of conservative management efforts that might rebuild fish stocks in the long term, and begin to reopen the window of angling opportunity that has been slowly sliding shut for three decades and more.