WINTER FLOUNDER: HOW SOON WE FORGET

 

I was sitting around the other morning, drinking the day’s first cup of tea nd scrolling through my news alerts from the previous day when I pulled up an article from Outdoor Life magazine’s website:  “The Lost Art of Winter Flounder Fishing.”

The blurb under the title read

“These delicious underdog flatfish are making a comeback, and now is the time to get in on the action,”

and the only reaction I could have to that was

“Really?  This is going to be good,”

because I’ve lived long enough to remember when there really was a winter flounder fishery, long enough to watch that fishery die, and if anybody really believes that winter flounder are “making a comeback” today, they believe in the walking dead.

I did most of my flounder fishing off the southwestern corner of Connecticut in Long Island Sound, between the late 1950s and 1983, when I moved to Long Island, although I’ve also caught a few in Massachusetts and, for a couple of decades, removed my share from Long Island’s Great South Bay.  There were flounder around in those years, enough fish that, when I was a boy, most people chased them throughout the season.

It didn’t really matter when you fished back then; there were always flounders.  Particularly during the spring and the fall, there were enough fish in the creeks, harbors, and coves that you could usually catch a fair number while fishing from shore.  Even during the summer, the folks lining the ripraps at the town parks usually managed to put a half-dozen or so in their pails.  As boys in third or fourth grade, beginning around the middle of March, we’d go down to the marinas lining the Mianus River and fish off the docks, usually managing to catch enough flounder for a family meal.  The docks were technically off-limits to fishing, but at that time of year, with boats still resting in their canvas cocoons, the folks who worked at the marinas usually looked the other way.

By the time I moved to Long Island, Great South Bay’s flounder were already experiencing overfishing, although we didn’t even suspect it at the time.  Fish were still being caught by the pailful, at least in the spring and fall; 1984 saw New York anglers take home just under 14.5 million winter flounder, the highest annual landings ever recorded for the state.  And it wasn’t only New York that was enjoying the bounty.  In that same year, Massachusetts landed slightly over 4.8 million fish, Connecticut nearly 2.7 million, and New Jersey slightly under 8.5 million; even in little Rhode Island that year, recreational fishermen took a little more than 1.5 million flounder home.

But as pioneer ecologist Aldo Leopold once noted,

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.  Much of the damage inflicted on land is invisible to laymen.  An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

What is true for the land and for ecologists is too often true for fish stocks and fisheries biologists as well.  By the mid-1980s, fisheries managers could see that the winter flounder was experiencing problems; the number of young fish recruiting into the population had dropped, and the population itself was beginning to slide.  But with catch levels still high, and with the flounder driving a lot of business for the tackle shops and the party boat fleet, resistance to any sort of recreational regulations was high. 

When the first regulations came out here in New York, they were, as a result, laughably lax.  As I recall, that first set of rules imposed an 8-inch minimum size and a bag limit of either 20 or 25 flounder, the smallest bag that was even remotely acceptable to the party boat fleet, which argued that their customers had to have the “perception” that a so-called “big day”—that is, a pail filled with fish—was still possible, or they wouldn’t want to pay the cost of the trip.

But outside of the public hearings and the fisheries meetings, everyone quietly admitted that those “big days” were notably few and far between.

From then on, the fishing decayed at first slowly, and then at a faster pace, and fisheries managers were never willing to impose the restrictions needed to stem the tide.  By the year 2000, one didn’t need to be a biologist to see that the flounder were in real trouble; by then, New York’s annual landings had fallen to just 575,000 winter flounder—a long way from the 14,500,000 of just 16 years before—and other states were following suit, with Massachusetts’ landings falling to less than 165,000, Rhode Island’s to 68,000, and Connecticut’s to 18,000.  Outside of northern New England, only New Jersey was maintaining a fairly strong fishery, although at just under 3 million flounder landed, even its recreational harvest was less than half of what it had been in 1984.

The winter flounder population went into freefall after that, and while wishful thinkers might say that the species “is making a comeback,” the facts belie that claim.

In 2024, New York’s anglers landed an estimated 2,737 winter flounder, although the surveyors working on behalf of the National Marine Fisheries Service intercepted so few successful flounder anglers that their estimate is almost meaningless; once its inherent uncertainty is taken into account, the actual landings might have been anywhere between zero (which is extremely unlikely, since if the surveyors hadn’t counted a single fish, New York shouldn’t have been included in the catch data) to 8,334.  Other states are in a similar situation with respect to the number of flounder caught and the quality of the data.  Massachusetts had the highest landings estimate, 32,123 (which might really have been anywhere between zero and 72,292), followed by New Jersey at 1,500, Connecticut at 333, and Rhode Island at 165.  The northern New England states, which exhibited lesser landings twenty or forty years ago, now had some of the largest recreational landings, with Maine and New Hampshire landing an estimated 4,491 and 1,618 winter flounder, respectively.

But compared to the years when the stock was relatively healthy, and over 20 million fish were landed coastwide, such numbers would be lost to rounding error; even the New England states’ landings are still, at best, trivial.  So, when I read about anglers “pounding winter flounder in Cape Cod Bay,” as described in the Outdoor Life piece, the best that I could muster was a bitter smile.

Yes, the Gulf of Maine winter flounder stock, which ranges roughly from the “elbow” of Cape Cod to the Canadian border, seems more abundant than the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic stock that is caught everywhere south of Cape Cod.  But that doesn’t mean that the fishing is anything approaching good.

Anglers may keep eight Gulf of Maine flounder, compared to just two farther south, and from what I’ve been told, it’s not unusual for an angler fishing at the right time, on the right tide, and probably from one of the charter boats that knows the area well, to put a limit of fish in the boat.  And maybe today, when flounder are scarce, landing those eight flounder seems impressive.

But, once again, some of us remember an earlier time.  We remember the days described by Capt. Jason Colby, who still operates a successful charter operation in Massachusetts and is one of the better-known flounder captains in the region, in an article that he wrote for The Fisherman magazine a few years ago:

“Growing up on Long Island, NY, I often heard tales of fellow fishermen taking buses up to Quincy, Massachusetts to go flounder fishing.  ‘Why,’ I asked, “would anyone travel four-plus hours on a bus when they had a viable local fishery?’  Well, as it turned out, the answer was quite simple:  the fishing was EPIC!

“Upon arrival at Hough’s Neck in Quincy, MA, anglers would be greeted by a sign that proclaimed the area to be, ‘The Flounder Capitol of the World.’  The two major destinations were Harvey’s Fishing Station and Hurley’s Fishing Station, both just off Sea Street.

“During the season, local kids would get up at 4 a.m. to put the float cushions, anchors, oars and motors on the boats so that they would be ready when the buses arrived around 8 o’clock.  The men fished while the kids went to school, and when they got out, the skiff fleet was beginning to trickle back to the dock.  Then the real work began!  Hauling the gear back to the boat sheds, and the fishermen’s gear back to the bus, was followed by filleting the hundreds of fish that had to be cut, bagged and tucked into coolers for the ride back to New York.  There were also buses from New Jersey and even some from Philadelphia, which shuttled happy anglers from all across the Northeast.”

Needless to say, all of those busloads of anglers didn’t head up to Quincy to catch just eight flounder apiece. 

Instead, they brought back coolers packed with fillets.  And they didn’t need a charter boat captain’s intimate knowledge of season, bottom, and tides to bring back a peach basket brimming with flounder; the anglers’ boats scattered across Quincy Bay and Boston Harbor, stopping wherever the anglers’ guts told them to stop, and if they might have to move from time to time over the course of the day, and some boats caught more fish than others, no one went home skunked, and very few departed unhappy.

What we see now is the merest remnant of those days.  The surviving fish do not represent a “comeback” of the winter flounder stock, but rather the mere dregs that remain once the rest of the cup has been drained.  But to understand the fishery that we have lost, one must have started their angling career at least twenty or twenty-five years ago.  If you started any later than that winter flounder, for most practical purposes, were already gone.

Thus, I had a few, somewhat contradictory reactions when I read an article that stated, as the Outdoor Life piece did, that

“The funny thing about these fish is that historically they were a real crowd pleaser.  Throughout the Northeast, anglers swarmed the coast in late winter and early spring to target them, creating an entire culture around the fleeting window in which these fish were available.

“That culture has largely dissolved, but the fish are still there for the taking…There’s no boat necessary.  All you need to understand are these basics.”

My first, and perhaps my strongest, reaction upon reading that invoked images of cattle and manure.  Back when there was a viable flounder fishery throughout the northeast, there was not an “entire culture” built around it; we welcomed the flounder when they showed up in the spring, when you would find just about everyone, from the rental skiffs to the big sportfishermen, anchored up in the channels hauling them over the side.  Then, as the waters warmed, most of us moved on to fluke and weakfish, bass and blues, tuna, sharks, and whatever else the sea offered, then returned to the flounder toward the end of the year, to put some fillets in the freezer before the bay froze.

You might make a trip to Quincy, but that was something you did once or twice each year; it wasn’t a “cultural” thing, any more than a trip out to Montauk to charter for stripers or tuna might be.

And there was no “fleeting window” in which to fish, for while fishing was better during the spring and fall, you could scratch up a few flounders—often, enough to fill an eight-fish bag limit, had such a thing even existed back then—even during the dog days of summer, although you might have to fish different spots at that time of year.

But the suggestion that anyone can readily catch a bunch of flounder these days—that “the fish are there for the taking…All you need to understand are these basics” is downright offensive.

I’ve been a member of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Winter Flounder Advisory Panel since the late 1990s.  I know, and am regularly in touch with, PhD-level scientists who have made winter flounder a part of their life’s work.  And if one thing is clear, it’s that the flounder are not “there for the taking” at all.

From the recreational fisherman’s perspective, there are two flounder stocks (the other, on Georges Bank, is almost exclusively a commercial fishery).

One, the Gulf of Maine stock presents an enigma.  The 2022 Management Track Stock Assessment, relying on the number of fish at least 30 millimeters (12 inches) or more in length being detected in trawl surveys, found that the stock was not experiencing overfishing.  However, biologists have, to date, been unable to calculate the size of the stock needed to produce maximum sustainable yield, or what that maximum sustainable yield might even be, and they have no idea whether the stock is overfished or not, although they do know that abundance was higher in 2021 than it was over the previous decade.  Combined recreational and commercial catch in 2021 was 168 metric tons, well below the approximately 8,000 metric tons caught in 1982; although that change probably reflects both a decline in abundance and a halt to overfishing, the fact that recent landings are only about 2% of what they were forty-three years ago certainly suggests that, at most times and in most places, even the more abundant Gulf of Maine flounder are not nearly as abundant as the Outdoor Life article suggests.

When we look at the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic winter flounder, we uncover a more tragic truth, which is concealed beneath the mere fact that, according to its 2022 Management Track Stock Assessment, the Southern New England fish are neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing.  That stock assessment advises that

“There was a change to the stanza of recruitment that was used in the projections for this species…The new recruitment stanza was the last 20 years of estimates (2002-2021) for both short term projections, and to estimate the biomass target (SSBMSY) from a long term (100 yr) projection.  Previous years have used the entire time-series recruitment (1981-present).  Many of the historical recruitment estimates are overly optimistic, if not impossible, for the current stock size and productivity to achieve.  Very early recruitment estimates are 20 times the levels seen in recent years…

“The stock status of Southern New England Mid-Atlantic winter flounder has changes since the previous operational update and from the status determined at the last benchmark assessment in 2011.  The overfished status of the stock has changed to not overfished, and the stock is now considered rebuilt by the 2023 deadline.  The reason for this change in status determination is directly due to changing the recruitment stanza going into the projections…The truncated recruitment stanza eliminates the highest estimates of historical recruitment and greatly reduces the median recruitment used by the projections.  The lower median recruitment estimates in the long-term BRP projection results in a much lower [spawning stock biomass] value for the SSBMSY reference point.  While the stock status has changed, the perception of the stock has not, and recent model estimates and fishery independent survey indices all reveal a poor stock condition for southern New England winter flounder.  [emphasis added]”

Thus, the fact that the southern New England stock is no longer considered overfished does not mean that the stock is healthy or that abundance is increasing; rather, spawning stock biomass declined substantially, from 6,186.4 metric tons in 2012 to 3,353.2 metric tons in 2021, even as the stock’s status was upgraded to “not overfished.”

Certainly, there’s no comeback taking place there.

And yet, upon reconsideration, I think that my initial reaction to the Outdoor Life piece was too harsh.  I shouldn’t expect an author to know what a truly healthy winter flounder fishery looks like, or the sort of abundance one experiences when the flounder are truly “there for the taking,” when that author neer experienced such fishing or such abundance for themselves. 

After all, the Gulf of Maine stock probably did grow more abundant between 2010 and 2021, and if you weren’t fishing in the early 1980s, and those recent years form your only frame of reference, today’s meager fishery probably does look like a “comeback” to you.  It’s a classic example of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome, in which we gauge the health of a stock based on our own limited experience with an already-depleted resource, and thus never understand just how good fishing on a truly healthy stock could be.

On my last trip down to Washington, D.C., as I wandered around the offices on Capitol Hill, speaking to various legislators’ staffs about fisheries issues, I met one staffer from a western Long Island congressional district.  Like most of his kind, he was young, just a few years out of college or law school.  But this particular staffer was also an avid saltwater angler, and as we spoke casually after our meeting, I learned one thing:

He had never caught, and had never even seen, a living winter flounder.

I was taken aback, but then I realized that, if you hadn’t been fishing twenty or even twenty-five years ago, your chances of catching a winter flounder on Long Island have since become increasingly small.

Over the course of just a few decades, we have forgotten what the winter flounder fishery was.  And over the course of a single generation, many have forgotten—in truth, have never known—that ever existed.

In such a context, catching a handful of flounder could, indeed, seem a big deal.