FISHERIES: MANAGING FOR THE MINORITY

The most recent edition of Fisheries of the United States, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s annual report to Congress, reveals that, in 2018, there were 8.5 million recreational salt water anglers, who fished all along the nation’s coast.  Those anglers made 194 million separate fishing trips, with about 54 million of those trips made in the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions.

In the New England and Mid-Atlantic, the overwhelming share of all recreational fishing trips are made by anglers either fishing from shore (60 percent) or from private boats (38 percent).  The remaining 2 percent of the trips are made on for-hire vessels, with party and charter boats each accounting for about 1 percent of all angling excursions.

Yet in more and more fisheries, we are seeing fisheries managers going out of their way to craft regulations that favor that small for-hire sector.  And since fisheries management is essentially a zero-sum game, in which a finite quantity of fish must be divided up among all user groups, that means that regulations that convey special benefits to the for-hire sector must necessarily take away benefits from everyone else.

I was reminded of that again when I read an op-ed piece on newportri.com, which discussed new recreational striped bass regulations being proposed in Rhode Island.  

As I’ve reported here on multiple occasions over the past few months, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board adopted a coastal slot limit of 28 to 35 inches last October, but is also allowing states to adopt different regulations, provided that such rules achieve at least an 18 percent reduction in such states’ striped bass fishing mortality. 

For a while, it looked like Rhode Island might be the only state in the northeast that would adopt such alternative regulations.  All of the others are seeking regional consistency by adopting the ASMFC’s preferred slot, and at least one state, Massachusetts, has formally and publicly urged Rhode Island to adopt that slot, too.

Fortunately, just today, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management announced that it would, in fact, support regional unity and adopt the ASMFC's preferred slot.

However, there was real concern for a while that the state would strike out on its own, when it appeared that the Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council, which advises the Department, recommended that the Department go its own way, ignore the weight of comments from the state’s fishermen, and adopt a 32 to 40-inch slot for most anglers, and a more liberal, 30 to 40-inch slot, for its for-hire fleet.  

As described in the newportri.com op-ed,

“The R.I. Party & Charter Boat Association (55 members) advocated for a conservation equivalency proposal for charter boats and then a separate regulation for everyone else…

“Special treatment for charter/party boats is not fair.  They already have beneficial tautog and bluefish regulations with seasons adjusted to fit their business needs.  In addition, their customers can fish without the recreational licenses required of all other anglers in R.I.  As a result no monies are generated to support new boat ramps or fishing piers or fund data gathering for the rest of us.

“Anglers (49,000 licenses in R.I.) including the R.I. Saltwater Anglers Association (7,500 affiliated members) advocated for the 28 to <35” coastwide option for consistency with neighboring states…”

The for-hire fleet isn’t just a distinct minority in Rhode Island when measured in terms of people; it is a minority when measured in terms of striped bass trips, too.  

Over the five years between 2015 and 2019, Rhode Island anglers took about 4 million directed striped bass trips.  Surf fishermen took most of them (69.5 percent) with boat fishermen following well behind (29.5 percent).  For-hire trips, almost all on charter boats, accounted for slightly less than 1 percent of all trips taken.  And that percentage fell sharply through the five-year period, steadily from a high of 1.7 percent in 2016 to just 0.3 percent last year.

Thus, by any measure, Rhode Island’s for-hire fleet is a very small part of the state’s striped bass fishery, yet for a while, it seemed to be driving the regulatory process, to the detriment of not only surf and private-boat anglers, but to that of the striped bass itself.

Again quoting from the newportri.com op-ed,

“Dan McKiernan, acting director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, sent a public letter to Jason McNamee, R.I. resources deputy director, asking that Rhode Island not approve striped bass conservation equivalency options.

“McKiernan said, R.I. conservation equivalency ‘alternatives would erode the conservation benefit of slot limit management in our region given how striped bass migrate between states.’

“’Striped bass 35” to 40” in length protected in ME-MA and CT-NY, will be open to harvest in R.I., while fish 28” to 32” (or 28” to 30”) length protected in R.I., will be open to harvest in ME-MA and CT-NY…  the projected reduction in removals associated with Rhode Island’s conservation equivalency options will not be realized,’ said McKiernan.  Law enforcement in R.I. and the region said they oppose different coastwide regulations too.”

Given all that, it’s difficult to understand why the Rhode Island Marine Fisheries Council would recommend regulations that benefit only a tiny portion of its striped bass fishery, at the expense of the vast majority and of the fish itself.  Many anglers will be pleased that the Department of Environmental Management didn't listen.

However, such thinking isn’t limited to Rhode Island.

Maryland’s 2020 striped bass regulations, including both those that have been finalized and those that are expected to be adopted, but are still in the rulemaking process, are even more biased against the shore-based and private boat angler than what was, for a while, being contemplated in Rhode Island.  As described in an article in Delmarva Now,

“Anglers in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries will be limited to just one striped bass a day under new rules approved…by East Coast fishery managers.

“The only exception is in Maryland, where state officials plan to let those who can afford to pay for charter fishing trips to bring home two of the highly prized rockfish, as they are known in the bay…

“The state has shortened but [unlike Virginia] not closed its spring ‘trophy season,’ when anglers can go after the biggest of the species, even though those happen to be the most productive spawners.

“And the state is planning to crack down on anglers who ‘target’ rockfish for catch-and-release during times when it is illegal to keep them…

“Maryland’s proposed catch restrictions came in for particular scrutiny from critics who questioned the science behind the proposal and whether it would actually meet the [ASMFC’s] requirements…

“Michael Luisi, the [Maryland Department of Natural Resources’] director of fishery monitoring and assessment, defended the state’s plan…

“He said that charter boat customers would be allowed to keep twice as many fish as private anglers because charter captains fear that a one-fish-a-day limit would kill their businesses…”

It should be noted that, at meetings of the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board, Mr. Luisi was well known for giving a lot of lip service to the supposed problem of bass dying after being released, and how a smaller size limit would help to alleviate that problem.  However, after the ASMFC gave him a golden opportunity to put his words into action, with a one-fish bag limit and 18-inch minimum size in Chesapeake Bay, reducing dead discards no longer seemed to be one of his top priorities.  

Instead, Maryland appears intent on a 19-inch minimum size, with all of the additional discard mortality that will entail, and will allow charter boat anglers to keep two fish, which will increase discard mortality even more, particularly during the summer, when high water temperatures and low dissolved oxygen causes more released fish to die (Maryland will close the season for 16 days during the summer, but the poor water conditions last far longer than that).

Thus, even though for-hire vessels accounted for only about 4.2 percent of all Maryland directed striped bass trips during the period 2015-2019, Maryland designed its striped bass regulations to favor the for-hire fleet.  In doing so, the state abolished popular early and late season catch-and-release fisheries which, due to the cold water, likely had low levels of release mortality, depriving the shore and private-boat sectors of popular fisheries just to increase the for-hire kill.

Such pro-for-hire bias doesn’t just influence state regulations; it has infiltrated federal fisheries, too.  In December, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council responded to new data, which revealed higher than expected landings in the recreational bluefish fishery, by reducing the recreational bag limit from 15 to just 3 fish—except for the for-hire fishery, where anglers were awarded a 5-bluefish bag.  In announcing the change, the Council said that

“Although the Council’s Bluefish Monitoring Committee recommended a coastwide 3-fish bag limit, the majority of comments from the public and Bluefish Advisory Panel (AP) members [in both cases, mostly members of the for-hire fleet] expressed opposition to this option, noting that it would have severe economic consequences for the for-hire sector, which was only responsible for 3.6% of coastwide landings from 2016 to 2018.  Additionally, AP members and the public emphasized that these proposed reductions come at a challenging time for for-hire stakeholders as they are also facing new restrictions on striped bass, black sea bass, summer flounder and scup.  [AUTHOR’S NOTE:  Despite the Council’s comment, there will be no new restrictions on black sea bass, summer flounder nor scup, as 2019 regulations for all three species will be carried forward into 2020.]”

“Severe economic consequences” of one sort or another are always the justification for managing fish in a way that benefits the for-hire fleet, at the expense of the majority of anglers.  

Maybe such consequences are even real, but that doesn’t address the real management question:  Should regulations be drafted to grant special privileges to a very small and, in many fisheries, shrinking minority of the recreational sector, at the expense of the great majority of anglers?

I would argue that the correct answer is no.

Certainly, fisheries managers should try to find ways to accommodate a wide array of stakeholders; at the same time, whether they manage at the state or the federal level, managers do well to take the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act’s guidance to heart, and manage stocks in a way that

“will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation,”

rather than choose management measures that will provide the greatest benefit to the smallest sector of the recreational community.

Of course, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive.  It is completely feasible to set aside a portion of the recreational catch for the use of the for-hire sector, and to allow that sector to fish under regulations that are designed with that sector in mind.  

To make that work fairly—that is, to allow the for-hire sector to have their own rules, separate and apart from the rules that govern the vast majority of anglers—that sector must also have a separate allocation of fish that reflects their recent share of the fishery.  Under such an arrangement, both the for-hire sector and the shore/private boat sector should be held strictly accountable for their own performance, so that an overage by one sector does not adversely impact the other.

But “accountable” is not a popular word in the New England/Mid-Atlantic for-hire fleet.

That quickly became clear a few weeks ago, here in New York, when the Mid-Atlantic Council and the ASMFC held a joint scoping hearing on the pending Summer Flounder, Scup, and Black Sea Bass Commercial/Recreational Allocation Amendment.  

A number of the for-hire representatives present supported the concept of “sector separation,” but others were concerned that their slice of the pie, based on the for-hires’ current share of the landings, might be too constraining.  To avoid that issue, one person suggested that the for-hires should be granted special regulations that favored their sector, but still take their fish out of the general recreational quota, and not a sector-specific allocation.

Because who wouldn’t want to have special privileges, without any special accountability or countervailing responsibility?  Life is good when you can have what you want, and someone else pays the bill.

The argument they make, of course, is that a for-hire boat can only make money if its customers are allowed to kill and bring home relatively large quantities of fish.  Given today’s demands on often-depleted fish stocks, and the resultant regulations intended to maintain such stocks at sustainable levels, the upshot of that argument is that the for-hire customers should be allowed to kill and bring home more fish than the great majority of anglers, who fish from their own boats, or from shore.

But is it good public policy to allow that to happen? 

If a business can only survive if it is allowed to co-opt a disproportionately large share of a public resource, has that business outlived its time?

It’s a hard truth that economic and social conditions change.  Many companies that were economic powerhouses a half-century ago, retailers such as the F. W. Woolworth Company and the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P grocery), manufacturers such as the Bethlehem Steel Corporation and, in the maritime sphere, the Outboard Marine Corporation, and financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. and Security Pacific Bank all failed to adopt their businesses to changing times, and went broke.

If various for-hire operators choose to cling to a 1970 business model that relies on killing more fish than today’s science, and today’s sensibilities, deem wise, they shouldn’t expect the government to subsidize their businesses with public resources that belong to us all.  Failure is in their futures, too.

Fortunately, there are quite a few for-hire captains that understand that times change, and in turn are willing to change with the times.  

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, for-hire vessels asked the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council to adopt a sector separation plan that hinged on greater accountability for the for-hire sector, and would help managers avoid overfishing.

In the New England/Mid-Atlantic region, a new and growing alliance of charter boat owners, created just over a year ago, has organized around the premise of

“Promoting sustainable business through marine conservation.”

They’ve adopted the slogan

“If you take care of the fish, the fish take care of you,”

and introduce themselves as

“a coalition of forward-thinking guides, small business owners and like-minded anglers who understand the value of keeping fish in the water.  We realize that abundance equals opportunity, and that such opportunity is quite a bit more important to the future of fishing than low size limits and full coolers.”

Like the for-hire operators in the Gulf of Mexico, they understand the need for accountability, and understand that sector separation is worthless without it.

They understand that when it comes to fish stocks, we’re all in it together.  They understand that the future of fishing, and of their businesses, depends not on clinging to an outdated paradigm, but on embracing the future and advocating for the long-term health of fish stocks.

They understand that their future lies not in special privileges, and not in managing stocks for a tiny minority.  

They understand that their future lies in a management system that provides an abundance for all.

FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: ARE WE MAKING PROGRESS, OR FALLING BEHIND?

As we sit on the cusp of a new fishing season, I can’t help but feel a little pessimism. 

Inshore, striped bass and bluefish are overfished.  Winter flounder are all but gone.  Summer flounder aren’t overfished, but they’re also not abundant, with some very big fish and shorts around, but not too much in between.  Tautog (“blackfish”) remain fairly scarce, as do weakfish; scup and black sea bass are still abundant, but declining back toward more typical levels.  On the plus side, both kingfish and blowfish are injecting a bit of life into our summer bays.

Offshore, things are not going too well.  Bigeye and yellowfin tuna, along with true albacore, are far harder to come by than they were a couple of decades ago, although bluefin seem to be on an upswing.  Both blue marlin and white marlin remain overfished, while mako sharks are in serious decline. Thresher sharks still seem to be holding their own, although it’s not clear whether that’s due to true abundance, or merely an increased catchability that can be attributed to the large numbers of forage fish, mostly menhaden and chub mackerel, inside the 20-fathom line.  When I head offshore these days, I’m a lot more likely to be fishing light tackle for the abundant dolphin, rather than the 80s and spreader bars that I pull for bigger tuna.

Given the seeming decline in so many species’ abundance the question then is, are fisheries managers getting a handle on the problems?  Or are they involved in a losing fight?

While we’re definitely looking at a mixed bag, and while there are some real and intransigent fisheries issues, I’d argue that, at least inshore, we're making progress, although we will probably still have to face ugly fights before we solve some key problems.

Striped bass are the fish that pull the most anglers into the management process, and it’s hard to argue that the recently adopted Addendum VI to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan should give anyone confidence in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s management process.  

Unless angler effort continues to decline, the concessions that ASMFC’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board made to Maryland and New Jersey, when it approved their “conservation equivalent” management measures, are likely to prevent the Addendum from attaining its goal of an 18 percent reduction in fishing mortality (compared to 2017).

Even so, the debate at February’s Management Board meeting, which saw representatives from a number of states rise up to challenge the ASMFC’s casual use of conservation equivalency, and fight for some sort of accountability if supposedly conservation equivalent regulations fall short of their goals, was unusual for any ASMFC management board, and hopefully foreshadows a heightened sense of stewardship among at least some of the commissioners.  While the conservation advocates on the Striped Bass Management Board did not prevail with respect to Addendum VI, they will hopefully play an important role when that management board begins debate on a new addendum to the striped bass management plan at its May meeting.

It’s too early to make a prediction about how that amendment will ultimately turn out, but it’s at least somewhat comforting to know that the striped bass will have a number of friends sitting around the table when the conversation begins.

The last few months has also seen the ASMFC make real progress in managing Atlantic menhaden, one of the key forage species on the East Coast. 

Just six months ago, Omega Protein Corporation announced that they would be purse seining more menhaden in Chesapeake Bay than permitted under Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.  It seemed like a fait accompli, as Virginia—which controls the section of Chesapeake Bay where the fish were taken—had refused to adopt Amendment 3’s Chesapeake harvest cap.  That rendered Omega’s excessive harvest completely legal.

The ASMFC’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board had the authority to find Virginia out of compliance with the management plan as a result of such refusal, but if it did that, there was a very good chance that the Secretary of Commerce would overrule the management board finding and excuse Virginia’s inaction.

Then a very unusual thing happened.  The entire Management Board came together, and supported a noncompliance finding.  Even two Virginia representatives, expressing embarrassment over what had occurred (the Virginia governor and state fisheries managers wanted to comply with the ASMFC plan, but the Virginia legislature, which had the exclusive authority to manage the species, refused to do so), and voted in favor of the noncompliance decision.  The Secretary of Commerce recognized the broad support for ASMFC’s noncompliance finding, and imposed a moratorium on Virginia’s menhaden fishery that will go into effect next June.

At least, a moratorium would have gone into effect next June, had Virginia not come into compliance with the ASMFC’s management plan.  Faced with the reality of a pending moratorium, Virginia’s legislature passed a bill, which has been signed by Virginia’s governor, transferring menhaden management authority to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.  The Virginia commission may now adopt regulations that lower the Chesapeake harvest cap to the 51,000 metric tons required by the management plan.  Such reduced cap will help to assure that there are enough menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay to provide food for its wide array of finfish, seabirds and marine mammals.

And the ASMFC didn’t stop there.  It has approved a stock assessment that would set reference points—the standards used to measure the health of the menhaden stock and the sustainability of the menhaden fishery—based on such ecosystem considerations, and not merely on the characteristics of the menhaden stock itself.  While the reference points themselves weren’t made a part of the management plan at the February meeting, there is a very good chance that they will be adopted in May.  If that happens, menhaden will be the first East Coast species managed as a forage species, with an eye toward providing adequate food for predator species all along the coast.

Such ecosystem-based management would certainly be a big step forward.

Even when the initial news is bad, as in the case of bluefish, which a recent operational stock assessment found to be overfished, there can be good news waiting in the wings.  

Some of the good news is that the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council moved quickly, and started work on a rebuilding plan within just a few months after the stock assessment was completed.

The rest of the good news is that there is a chance—far from a certainty at this point, but still a real chance—that the upcoming amendment to the bluefish management plan will not only rebuild the stock to target abundance, but that it will break new ground by managing bluefish as a recreational species, emphasizing the need for an abundance of living individuals in the water, rather than the highest possible number of dead fish on the dock.

It will take a lot of work, and a lot of angler comment, for that to happen, but the mere fact that the Mid-Atlantic Council is willing to talk about it is a good sign.

Another bit of progress—which led to the discovery that bluefish are overfished—is the National Marine Fisheries Service recent improvement of its Marine Recreational Information Program, in order to get a better handle on anglers’ catch, landings and effort.  In the past, angler effort, and so calculations of catch and landings estimates, were based on an inefficient and not particularly accurate telephone survey; in recent years, NMFS has moved to a mail survey, a move that has been given high marks by the National Academy of Sciences, which found that it improves the quality of the data.

As a result of the improved data, we know that most popular fish stocks are more abundant than previously believed; we also know that anglers are catching and taking home more fish than anyone had thought.  That information will help fishery managers keep scup, black sea bass and summer flounder populations healthy, and rebuild bluefish to their former abundance.

Our inshore fish populations should thus grow healthier as time goes on.

Offshore, it’s a different story.  Most of the big pelagic species, including the marlins, the larger tunas, and pelagic sharks, are managed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, and United States regulations follow ICCAT advice.  Unlike NMFS, ICCAT isn’t governed by laws such as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Magnuson Act, and one of the few exceptions to Magnuson-Stevens’ deadlines to rebuild overfished stocks are those stocks managed by ICCAT and similar organizations.

While ICCAT stock assessments are generally based on the best available science, ICCATs management measures require international consensus, and that can be hard to come by, as illustrated by the 2018 clash between European purse seine boats and Asian and American longliners, who couldn’t agree on the proper management of the overfished bigeye tuna (although they reached at least partial agreement last year).  In the end, economic considerations usually trump science, and effective conservation measures are typically delayed unless a real crisis is at hand, or someone is losing money because a stock has declined too far.

And even then, some countries always try to cheat.

So if, like me, you often fish offshore, don’t expect life to get better at any time soon.

But inshore, things are slowly getting better, even if sometimes, perhaps with striped bass, they’re going to get somewhat worse before they improve.

You might not always notice the improvement, because there will always be things, like New Jersey’s “bonus” striped bass or Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay bass regulations, that make you feel like you’re losing ground.

The trick is to not lose hope, just because the path gets a little rough.  We made real progress with menhaden in the past year, and there is reason to believe that we can, with time, make progress with striped bass and bluefish, too.  

In the meantime, we will have scup and sea bass around to keep us busy, and a few summer flounder as well.  Hopefully, we can catch a few kingfish on hazy August afternoons, dine on blowfish tails, and know in our gut that with work, dedication and a refusal to quit, we can continue to move ahead.

THE ADMNISTRATION SEEKS TO SHORTCHANGE FISHERIES; RESPONSIBLE LEGISLATORS DISAGREE

I spent the last three days wandering around the nation’s capitol, visiting key legislators’ offices and asking them to reject the President’s proposed budget, which would cut the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget by 13 percent.

I wasn’t alone.  

Other New Yorkers, concerned with the health of our oceans, were working with me, and we were only one of a number of teams, made up of stakeholders from every coast, who were out conveying the message that our fisheries, and our oceans, should not be shortchanged.

Each of us brought our own concerns and experiences to the table, and came at things from a different angle.  For me, it was all about developing good fisheries science, using it to craft effective regulations, which are then adequately enforced.

All of that, in the end, requires a well-funded NOAA, and that’s something that we won’t enjoy if the President’s budget prevails.

The good news is that the power of the federal purse belongs to Congress, not to the President.  While the President’s budget is a policy statement, which expresses where the current Administration believes the nation should expend its treasure, only Congress can appropriate funds for particular purposes and actually fund federal agencies.

Congress and the President often have very different ideas on where that funding should go.  There are many members of Congress who are aware of the public benefits provided by NOAA, and who thus understand the benefits conveyed by a fully-funded NOAA far better than does the current Administration, which seems unable to comprehend the need for good science or the effective conservation of public trust resources.

Our mission was to assure such legislators, including Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY-15) and Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY-17), that their long record of supporting adequate funding for marine conservation was deeply appreciated, and to encourage them to continue to support NOAA programs and to push back against the imprudent cuts in the Administration budget.

We were a diverse crew.  We came from many coastal states, and represented a host of interests, that were brought together by the common need for effective, science-based conservation and management of all of the nation’s marine resources.

Some of us were anglers, although I was the only recreational fishermen on the New York team.  Others on our team were educators, or represented researchers, aquarists, marine mammal advocates and other conservation interests.  Coastal zone management was a concern, as was marine debris, anadromous fish stocks and the impacts of a warming ocean on shifting fish populations.  But regardless of our particular concerns, we all were interested in preventing unwise cuts to the agency budget.

That being said, we each focused on the issues that we were most familiar with, and that were most important to us.  Naturally, I concentrated on fisheries matters.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am an advocate for effective, science-based fisheries management.  So in every office that we visited, I discussed the critical role that the Northeast Fisheries Science Center plays in our local fisheries, and explained how badly both recreational and commercial fishermen would be hurt if the Center was forced to cut back on its capability to produce not only the definitive, benchmark stock assessments that come out every five years or so, but also the regular monitoring and the interim, “operational” assessments that provide snapshots of stocks’ health in between the benchmarks.

New York's Senator Chuck Schumer has long been involved with fisheries issues.  He has again introduced S. 908, the “Fluke Fairness Act,” which is intended to compel fisheries managers to consider the impacts of warming waters and a shifting summer flounder stock when managing the recreational and commercial summer flounder fisheries, and would provide New York fishermen with summer flounder catch limits that reflect the current abundance of fish in local waters. 

Thus, when visiting Sen. Schumer’s office, in addition to talking about the general need for good science, I singled out the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s role in researching the impacts of climate change on so-called “shifting stocks,” which include summer flounder.  For it is the climate-driven shift in summer flounder abundance that created the need for the Fluke Fairness Act, and it is the continuing shifting stocks research being conducted by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center that will demonstrate the merits of Sen. Schumer’s bill.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has co-sponsored the Fluke Fairness Bill, and has long reached out to New York’s fishermen; about 15 months ago, I had the privilege of being invited to a fishermen’s and farmer’s forum that she held at Stony Brook University, where she listened very carefully to, and was already largely aware of, fishermen’s concerns.  Thus, her office has long supported fisheries science, and adequate funding for NOAA. 

While there, I made a point of mentioning a science program that’s particularly important to me, the Narragansett Marine Laboratory’s Cooperative Shark Tagging Program, the largest and oldest cooperative fish tagging program in the world, which has leveraged its modest budget into a public/private partnership of scientists, anglers and commercial fishermen throughout the North Atlantic basin, who have tagged about a quarter-million sharks of 35 different species since the program began in 1962.  An atlas of sharks tagged between 1962 and 2013, which revealed some new and unexpected information on many shark species was recently released, and is just one more example of the quality science that NOAA produces,

When we stopped by the office of Nydia Velasquez (D-NY-07), who sits on the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Water, Oceans and Wildlife, and is a member of the House Estuaries Caucus, we talked about adequate NOAA funding, including adequate funding for the two fisheries management bodies that have the greatest impact on New York fishermen, the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.  

As we visited the offices of Grace Meng (D-NY-06) and Thomas Suozzi (D-NY-03), and in all of the other legislative offices visited by the New York team, I also concentrated on two very important truths:  That effective, science-based management leads to healthy and abundant fish stocks, that such abundance inspires greater angling effort, and that such greater angling effort results in greater economic benefits to fishing-related businesses; and also that the best science, which leads to the best-crafted regulations, doesn’t achieve very much if those regulations aren’t obeyed.  That can be a particular problem when federal regulations are being violated in federal waters—poaching striped bass in the EEZ is one particularly virulent example—where enforcement efforts are relatively limited.

Thus, I emphasized the need to continue adequate funding for joint enforcement agreements, that see federal funds transferred to state enforcement agencies, such as New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which then conduct enforcement activities that support federal fisheries regulations.  It’s a program that benefits both state and federal enforcement efforts and, more importantly, provide real benefits for the nation’s marine resources.

As yesterday wore down, and I made my way back toward Washington’s Union Station and my train back to New York, I was slowly relaxing after spending much of the past few days thinking of little but fisheries issues.  The soles of my feet were a little sore from walking around on the Hill.

But I was happy, because I had been dealing with a lot of good people in a lot of legislators’ offices, who made it clear that they didn’t agree with the President's plan to irresponsibly slash the NOAA budget, and leave the agency unable to adequately conserve and manage the nation’s fish, its protected marine resources, its estuaries and coastal habitats. 

There are long fights ahead.  But I've also observed first-hand that there are also folks in the House and the Senate who are willing and able to win them.

DO ANGLERS CARE ABOUT BLUEFISH MANAGEMENT?

As has been reported in these pages before, bluefish have become overfished, and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council is beginning to develop a rebuilding amendment to restore the stock to its target level of abundance.  The first, and I would argue perhaps the most important, step in that process is to conduct so-called “scoping” hearings, when the Council reaches out to all of the interested parties to see what they would like included in the bluefish management plan.

I call scoping the most important part of the process because, during the scoping process, everything is still on the table.  In the case of bluefish, the only thing that’s already decided is that the stock must be rebuilt, and rebuilt within ten years.  How the stock will be rebuilt—that is, will managers use size limits, bag limits and/or seasons—and whether the rebuilding period should be less than ten years, are all still up in the air.

But scoping takes in much more than that.  It sets the stage for what the bluefish fishery should look like after rebuilding.  For example, should it remain a primarily recreational fishery, with close to 90 percent of the landings going to the recreational sector, or should anglers have to give up some of their fish so that the commercial folk can enjoy a bigger share of the pie?  Should all anglers have to follow the same regulations, or should those on for-hire boats be granted special privileges?  And, perhaps most important of all in a recreational fishery where nearly two-thirds of fish caught are released, should bluefish be managed for the highest sustainable landings, which will reduce bluefish abundance and result in fewer big fish, or should it be managed for high abundance, which would lead to lower landings, but result in greater overall availability to anglers, and more of the larger “gator” blues in the population?

Given how important bluefish are to the recreational fishery, one might think that anglers would be concerned about such question, but at least here in New York, that’s apparently not the case.  When New York’s scoping hearing was held last Thursday night, recreational fishermen replied with a yawn.

That doesn’t mean that the hearing room was empty.

The for-hire fleet came in numbers, probably filling close to one-fourth of the available seats.  They can be a chaotic force at such meetings at times, but last Thursday the for-hires remained relatively disciplined and on-message.  They let the Council (and New York’s representatives to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, who were also in the room and will be a part of the process) know that, in their view, bluefish are not overfished, but merely went “someplace else” in the ocean, that the data used in the stock assessment is wrong, and that declines in bluefish landings can be attributed to most anglers’ lack of interest in the species as they can to a decline in the stock.

The lack of anglers at the hearing lent mute support to such claims of disinterest.

There were also quite a few commercial fishermen in the room.  Some left after the previous hearing, addressing the possible reallocation of summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass, was done, and those that stayed didn’t say very much, although they did make it clear that they were worried about their small 2020 quota and the possibility of a mid-season closure of the fishery.  While I don’t think that I heard any of them explicitly call for a permanent transfer of recreational quota, they also didn’t want to change the current provision of the management plan that allows the “unused”—and to make things clear, you can replace that word with “unharvested”—portion of the recreational quota to be transferred to the commercial sector if the Council elects to do so.

The commercials and for-hires accounted for most of the folks in the room, but there were also quite a few fisheries managers present.  There was Council staff, and at least one of New York’s Council members, along with representatives of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (one of whom was also acting on behalf of the Council as hearing officer), DEC law enforcement, and New York’s representatives to the ASMFC.

Outside of one reporter and someone who I believe was legislative staff, the smallest group at the hearing was made up of New York’s anglers.  I think that there were ten, and two of those were people I didn’t recognize, who might have been from the for-hire or commercial sectors.  They addressed different aspects of the bluefish management issue.

A number were concerned about maintaining the traditional fishery for young-of-the-year “snapper” bluefish, arguing that it was one of the ways to recruit children into recreational fishing, and also citing the importance of that fishery to the local bait and tackle industry.  They generally seemed to support a higher bag limit for the little bluefish, at least in the case of children (there was some talk of only allowing those less than 16 years old to keep extra fish), apparently believing that such young anglers won’t enjoy fishing unless they can kill a batch of snappers to show off at home.

I’m not sure that I buy the latter part of that argument.  Most kids on the dock either allow their snappers to bake in the hot August sun or toss them into buckets of only slightly cooler salt water to marinate for hours, meaning that the fish are largely unfit for consumption by the time they’re brought home; encouraging young anglers to show off fish that are later tossed out is probably the wrong way to initiate budding fishermen into the recreational community.  For years, I served as weighmaster at a local fishing club’s annual snapper contest, where we required every entrant to weigh their fish in alive and immediately return them to the water, and I don’t recall a single child being upset that they couldn’t take their fish home.

Maybe I’m wrong about that, but even if I am, a three-fish bag limit should be enough to satisfy a new angler’s desire to bring something home, while still having a negligible impact on the stock.

One angler, speaking for a large state organization, opposed in-season transfers of recreational quota to the commercial sector, but didn’t appear to be opposed to a permanent reallocation.

I was the only person in the room to focus on the fact that, among all of the federally-managed fisheries centered between Cape Hatteras and the Canadian border, bluefish stands alone as the only one that is both dominated by the recreational sector and dominated by catch and release, with about 65 percent of all bluefish landed between 2010 and 2019 returned to the water.  I argued that in such a fishery, managing for yield—that is, dead fish on the dock—is inappropriate; recreational release fisheries should be managed for abundance—for live fish in the water.

But as I said, I was the only one who pushed that point, although one other angler did agree that most bluefish were released (while someone else took a contrary view).

I don’t know what attendance was like, or what was said, at other hearings being held all along the coast.  But the biggest takeaway from the New York session is that anglers aren’t particularly concerned about bluefish.  Even with the hearing scheduled for 7:30, when most would have had time to get there after work, very few bothered to attend.

It’s not hard to believe that such lack of attendance was noted by all who were there, and will be taken into account when the rebuilding plan, and further management actions, are drafted. 

We can only hope that anglers’ low attendance was due to their decision to provide written comments instead.  The Council is accepting comments on the scoping document through March 17.  Details can be found at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/511cdc7fe4b00307a2628ac6/t/5e1cba2a701d3d18a809ba6b/1578940971944/Bluefish+Scoping+Document_Rebuilding_Final.pdf.

Of course, it’s possible that anglers aren’t sending in written comments, either.  But if that is the case, well, not showing up at the hearings and not providing comments is powerful testimony of its own kind.

COD: IT HAS COME DOWN TO THIS

If you didn’t start fishing for cod fifty years ago, it’s probably hard to understand what codfishing was like back then.

It was far from perfect; the bloom had long before fallen from the rose, which probably isn’t surprising for a fishery that had already been exploited by commercial fleets for nearly five hundred years, and was pounded by fleets of foreign factory trawlers for the past twenty.

Even so, in the 1960s and even in the opening years of the 1970s, codfishing was still good enough to suport fleets of party and charter boats in ports extending from New Jersey to Maine, boats that regularly targeted cod either seasonally or throughout the year.  

While the New York Metro angling press might have referred to cod as the “winter king,” and boats filled with anglers might have sailed out of New York and New Jersey ports during the coldest months of the year, anglers who knew how to find and fish offshore wrecks, sailing out of the same ports, found plenty of quality cod during the height of the summer.

I hooked my first cod in August 1960, a few days after my sixth birthday, while fishing on a tourist-focused half-day boat out of Provincetown, Mass.  For the next few years, our August vacations followed the same pattern, always ending with a cod trip out of somewhere, eventually moving from Provincetown's half-day boats to full-day operations out of other New England ports.  

We caught fish, even though we fished largely nearshore waters on boats catering to largely inexperienced anglers.

I finally graduated to the big leagues at the age of 13, joining my father and two of his friends on late May trip out of Galilee, Rhode Island.  There, we boarded the, Sea Squirrel, a 65-foot party boat that began life, I was told, as a World War II sub chaser, to make the rolling, 2 ½-hour trip out to Cox’s Ledge.  

Cox’s, in those days, was the promised land for codfishermen in southern New England.  Its cold water, rock/gravel bottom and abundant baitfish held cod throughout the year, and my first visit to the place was no exception.  Although the fish ran small that day—my father and another fishermen split the pool with a pair of 35 pound cod—our baits rarely sat on the bottom for more than a couple of minutes before attracting attention.  By the end of the day, my left hand was blistered from the hard wood grip of my old-fashioned boat rod, while my right index finger was raw and bleeding from constantly cranking the reel, but I was a happy and dedicated codfisherman from that day forth.

Or at least I was, until the fish disappeared.

The big foreign factory ships continued to hammer all of the New England groundfish, working constantly without any regard for the size or number of fish being killed.  In 1976, Congress finally passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which pushed the foreign boats 200 miles offshore, but also gave domestic fishermen strong economic incentives to upgrade and expand their fleet and take up where the foreign boats left off.

Fishing remained half-decent throughout the ‘70s.  It was good enough in the fall of ’75 for me to lead three friends from college down to Galilee on a windy October Friday night, without any thought to what fishing might be like, and putting three cod on ice, including a 26 and a 31, despite fairly awful conditions (we’ll leave the details about cleaning those fish inside a college dorm, and the panicked reaction of an already drunken janitor when he saw a bloody cod eye staring out through the clear garbage bag when he emptied the men’s room trash on Monday morning, for another time).

But by the end of the decade, you could feel the continuing decline.

Some good fish were still being caught.  You could still ride a party boat out to Cox’s Ledge during the middle of summer, and expect the pool fish to break 40 pounds, and maybe top 50 as well.  But the absolute number of fish, and to some extent their size, was headed downhill. 

It seems that pushing the foreign boats offshore didn’t solve the problem, for as Discover magazine explained,

“Fishermen had lobbied Congress hard to have the foreign trawlers kicked out, and they expected a bonanza.  Between 1977 and 1983, the number of boats fishing out of New England increased from 825 to 1,423.  The new boats were bigger and equipped with the latest electronic fish-finding equipment.  The fish never had a chance.  The cod catch on Georges Bank alone peaked in 1982 at more than 53,000 tons.  Then it started to decline.  As the stock declined, the mortality inflicted by fishing rose, just as it did in Newfoundland [before cod stocks collapsed there].  The difference is that in New England, fisheries biologists knew it was happening all along, and said so.”

But those biologists were all ignored.

By the early 1980s, my wife and I moved to the South Shore of Long Island, New York, and my days of driving up to the Rhode Island party boats was over.  There just weren’t enough fish to justify the trip.  I jumped on a couple of boats sailing out of Captree State Park during the winter, but Long Island’s winter fishery was already on the skids.  The boats still caught a few good fish, usually early in the season (the Friday after Thanksgiving often produced), but they talked a far better game than the fishing deserved. 

I still recall taking one trip that produced four small cod for the entire boat—two of them caught on hooks that the boat’s mates attached to the weights on the buoys they used to help them anchor over the wrecks—and learning that we had done better than any other boat in the fleet.  And how one of the other boats reported to a local paper, which duly printed the report, that it had caught close to twenty fish up to 35 pounds on that same day, just to keep their business going just a little bit longer.  

Some anglers doubtless believed that report, because such catches had often been made just a few years before, but the days of good local codfishing were over.

But my appetite for cod continued, so I booked with Montauk’s Viking Fleet, which specialized in making long-range trips to distant grounds where cod were still reportedly big and abundant.  Again, there were good days, but the hype overran reality.  I remember thinking, at the close of a three-day “Whale Cod” trip out to Georges Bank, that I had to run 13 hours, on a fast, modern boat, and spent parts of three days fishing, to catch fewer, and no larger, fish than I had caught on that first day trip to Cox’s Ledge, aboard a slow, converted sub chaser, twenty years before.

And things ran downhill from there.

As Discover magazine reported,

“the National Marine Fisheries Service is charged with assessing the status of fish stocks and with overseeing their management.  But recommendations as to what restrictions, if any, to place on fishing are left to regional councils composed of mostly fishing industry representatives—fish processors, fishermen’s association leaders, and fishermen themselves.

“During the 1980s the New England Council proved itself unwilling to control fishing.  Indeed, one of its early actions, in 1982, was to eliminate catch quotas.  Its goal, it said, was a simpler system that would allow the fishery to operate in response to its own internal forces.  As the decade progressed, the fishery did just that—and as NMFS scientists warned of declining stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder, the council dithered…”

Cod and other New England groundfish continued to decline as a result.  

I reluctantly stopped fishing for them, as numbers fell lower, although I still took the occasional winter trip out of Captree for old times’ sake.  Things finally got bad enough that Congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which amended the 1976 Act, now called the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act after its primary sponsors, to require that local councils end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks in no more than ten years, if it was biologically possible to do so. 

Although many fishermen up in New England originally supported the 1996 law, as they knew that fish stocks were collapsing, they didn't like the idea of the new law capping their landings.  Thus, the New England Fishery Management Council became very adept at drafting management measures that would, on paper, satisfy the letter of the law, while evading its purpose.  The New England Council still avoided hard quotas at any cost, and tried to satisfy their legal obligations by limiting a boat’s days at sea, imposing trip limits, etc.

It didn’t work, and overfishing continued.  Cod continued to decline.

So the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and ManagementReauthorization Act of 2006 imposed new requirements, mandating that hardquotas, deemed “annual catch limits,” be imposed for just about every managedstock.  It also required that fishermenwho exceed such limits be held accountable.  But that hasn’t helped the cod, either.

Maybe it came too late, or maybe fishermen are just finding ways to evade the law.  There is someevidence suggesting that the latter is true, and that fishermen are dumping manyof the cod that they catch back into the ocean, dead, in order to avoid exceedingtheir quota and triggering accountability measures, which would include not only paybacks, but shutting down fisheries for more abundant groundfish in order to avoid killing more cod as unintended bycatch.

Still, many fishermen continue to focus on cod concentrations when they can find them.  About a decade ago, an unexpected increase in cod abundance in the Block Island, Rhode Island/Cox’s Ledge area caught their attention.  The fish were small by the standards of forty or fifty years ago—far more pool fish were under 20 than over 30—but the commercial and for-hire fleets swarmed the fish while they could find them, enjoying the chance to make a little money in what had come to be their barren winter season.

Faced with such fishing pressure, the abundance soon declined to more typical modern levels. 

Concentrating such high levels of fishing pressure on those cod may have doomed the last best chance of seeing cod return, in numbers, to the waters east of Long Island.  A 2014 paper, “Stock identification of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in US waters; an interdisciplinary approach,” published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, notes that cod off southern New England, on Cox’s Ledge and in the Mid-Atlantic spawn between December and April, meaning that the fishery was probably targeting spawning aggregations.

The paper also noted that

“Several studies indicate that cod exhibit spawning site fidelity and return to the same places to spawn each season…

“Once a spawning site has lost its resident population, it may remain barren even when cod are present on neighboring grounds…”

So fishermen may very well have shot themselves in the foot—again—on that one.

The bottom line is that cod stocks remain deeply distressed, with no sign of improvement on the horizon.

Cod are in such serious trouble that one marine conservation group with a long history of work on New England issues, the Conservation Law Foundation, has now petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service, requesting that the directed cod fishery be closed.  In a statement that is sadly all too accurate, it declared,

“After decades of reckless decision-making, Atlantic cod populations are now in crisis.  To give this iconic species a chance of survival and recovery, the federal government must take the strongest possible action today and temporarily prohibit further cod fishing.”

The petition also requests that NMFS require observers on all groundfish trips, to assure that there is a record of any cod that are incidentally caught and subsequently dumped, that important spawning and nursery areas are closed to fishing, and that action is taken to reduce cod bycatch in other fisheries.

New England fishermen will undoubtedly be hostile to the petition; many believe that there is still blood to be squeezed from this particularly dry and crumbling stone.  But it has come down to this:  NMFS must adopt whatever measures may be necessary and appropriate to conserve and rebuild northeastern cod stocks, or it must be willing to take full responsibility if, because of inadequate management action, fish stocks that once fed much of western Europe and eastern North America for centuries collapse, and never recover again.