New York’s black sea bass season opened last Tuesday, and I
was eager to get out and put some fish in the box.
Yesterday, with the work week behind me, I
finally ran out to one of my favorite wrecks, where the sea bass were fat and abundant.
It was great fishing.
I had my 8-fish limit in about 40 minutes; probably less time than it
took me to get to the wreck. The fish
had some shoulders, too. The biggest one
weighed over four pounds. I probably could have stayed out a bit longer and
been a bit pickier, and come in with nothing much under three; however, I
wanted to keep a few smaller ones to steam Chinese-style, with black beans, ginger
and soy.
There were clouds of sea bass on the depthfinder, and that
was a good thing to see, because once the season opens, anglers hit the fish pretty hard;
by fall, the clouds will be gone and the average size will be quite a bit
smaller.
Exuberant abundance at the
start of the season means that there will still be some fish around at its end.
The size and number of the black sea bass available to
anglers today is testimony to the effectiveness of the conservation provisions
of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery
Conservation and Management Act, and their ability to restore real abundance
to a fishery that had fallen on hard times not so many years ago.
One might think that everyone in the angling community would
be pushing to restore all of our fish stocks to similar levels of abundance,
but I learned earlier this week that’s just not the case, when someone pointed
me to the
blog of an organization that didn’t mince words, and but came right out and deemed
current calls for of managing for abundance “crap.”
The blog appears under the aegis of the Recreational Fishing
Alliance, and seems dedicated to the principal that if you can’t say something
bad about someone or something, it’s best to say nothing at all (the link that
I provided above leads to the single post being discussed here, but you can click on this link if you feel the need for
a second helping of vituperation).
It’s made up of the same kind of black helicopter stuff
about environmental organizations trying to impair recreational fishing that folks
have been trying to sell to anglers for years.
It confuses the concept of “managing for abundance,” which
is intended to provide more and larger fish for anglers to catch (although it
also creates a more stable age and size structure in fish populations), with a
report entitled Oceans of Abundance that was crafted
by a group of environmental organizations that support catch shares as a management
strategy.
Assuming that readers will be gullible enough to go along,
the blog then makes the next jump of illogic to warn
“That means fish
tags, auction houses, and state-run access lotteries as our future of
recreational fishing, all in the name of abundance!”
Let’s be
serious here. Can you imagine using fish
tags on a porgy boat? And scup are
already one of the most successful examples of “managing for abundance” that we
have…
After some additional blather that attempts to link managing for abundance with catch shares and
label it all an environmentalists’ plot, the blog goes on to identify those
supporting abundance as “well-spoken, hip conservationists,” and members of
some “angling elite” who “[rip] a page from the 21st century
progressive’s handbook” in order to seduce folks into believing that having a
lot of fish in the water is a good idea, and wraps up the entire process by
saying
“In other words, asking for abundance is
another way of saying ‘please, take away my right to fish.’”
One could respond by
saying that “opposing abundance is
another way of saying ‘please, don’t let
me catch many fish,’” but that’s probably too obvious for words…
At any rate, the
blog’s assertions would probably come as a pretty big shock to the nation’s largest
angling organizations, as well as to the primary trade associations
representing the recreational fishing and boatbuilding industries because, as
it turns out, they want folks to manage for abundance, too.
If the Recreational
Fishing Alliance had attended the 2014 Recreational Saltwater Fishing Summit that NOAA fisheries hosted back on April 1st
and 2nd (I believe that I saw RFA members and at least one of their regional
spokesmen there, but the national leadership was noticeably absent), perhaps it
would have been aware that “managing for abundance” was anything but a sinister
plot to chase anglers off the water; it was one of the central talking points at
the Summit, clearly supported by the leaders of the fishing tackle and
boatbuilding communities, as well as by spokesmen for the anglers themselves.
In February, the
Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership issued a detailed report entitled “A Vision for Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational
Fisheries”. A number of important recreational fishing
and boatbuilding organizations, including the Center for Coastal Conservation,
the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, the Coastal Conservation Association,
the American Sportfishing Association (the trade association for the fishing
tackle industry) and the National Marine Manufacturers Association were
contributors. That report explicitly
endorses managing for abundance, saying
“What recreational
anglers want and need is wide-ranging, dependable access to healthy and abundant fish stocks…
“Recreational anglers are more focused on abundance and size, structures of
the fisheries, and opportunities to get out on the water [emphasis added].“
It doesn’t, however,
endorse catch shares, because the folks who wrote the “Vision” report actually
understand the difference between the two.
No, “managing for
abundance” isn’t just for environmentalists anymore. In fact, it never was.
Speaking at a
previous recreational fishing summit, held a number of years ago, Bob Hayes,
General Counsel to the Coastal Conservation Association, offered what was
probably the best working description of the “managing for abundance” concept,
saying that
“Anglers want to be
able to catch a lot of fish, with some big ones.”
That’s what I found
on my sea bass wreck yesterday, and I thought that it was pretty good.
For who could say
that kind of fishing is bad?
That is, who other
than the RFA?
But then, RFA always
seems to forge its own path.
Hastings named it
the “Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries
Management Act”, but the bill is so bad that the conservation community is
calling it the “Empty Oceans Act”.
The Theodore
Roosevelt Conservation Partnership says that the bill
while the Center for
Coastal Conservation—which represents both the American Sportfishing
Association and the National Marine Manufacturers Association, among other
groups—issued a press release declaring “Recreational
Fishing and Boating Community Underwhelmed By House Magnuson-Stevens Act
Reauthorization Bill.”
But, contrary to the
comments emanating from most of the recreational community, RFA
calls H.R. 4742
Yes, RFA forges its
own path. But that path seems to be
getting pretty lonely these days.
There is a unique
service on the Internet that can be found at www.guidestar.org. Anyone
can go onto that site and, once registered (registration is simple and free)
find Form 990s—the tax return filed by tax-exempt organizations, including
501(c)(4) advocacy groups such as RFA—for any not-for-profit corporation with
significant income. When those returns
are filed, the signer states, under penalties of perjury, that they are “true,
correct and complete”.
So we can pretty
much assume that anything that a Form 990 says is true.
When one takes a
look at RFA’s Form 990, a couple of things jump out pretty quickly. The first one is that the Recreational
Fishing Alliance has quite a bit more money going out than coming in. The 2012 tax return, which is the last one
available on the Guidestar site, shows a loss of $109,824 for that year
(expenses of $693,286 on revenues of just $583,462); the 2010 and 2011 Form
990s show losses of $52,613 and $111,197, respectively.
Over the long term, RFA’s
2012 tax return shows an accumulated loss of $359,027; RFA apparently hasn’t shown a
profit since sometime before 2008, when it experienced yet another loss of
$135,676.
So whatever the
organization is selling on its blog and elsewhere, it doesn’t appear that a lot
of folks are buying…
That’s probably a
difficult thing to accept for RFA, which
bills itself as a
yet, according to
Schedule C of its 2012 Form 990, spent just $4,700 on lobbying in 2012, for “various
election campaign donations” (by contrast, the Coastal Conservation
Association, which as a 501(c)(3) organization cannot spend unlimited funds on
lobbying, still managed to devote $497,829 to that purpose in the same year).
But it appears that
RFA has not given up trying to sell its message and grow its membership
base. In 2012, for example, its Form 990
shows that it spent $130,664—twenty-seven times as much as it spent on
lobbying, and 22% of all revenues received that year—on “Advertising and
Promotion” and another $93,647 on “Dues Processing”.
Who knows how
successful those efforts will be for an organization that calls managing for
abundance “crap” and believes that the “Empty Oceans Act” is “a bill worth supporting.”
Maybe they’ll
convince anglers that their cause is the right one, and become profitable once
again.
Or maybe they will
stand on the shore as a modern-day analogue of old King Canute, and try to halt
a rising tide of support for “managing for abundance” with declarations that such
notions of management are “crap”—and share that ancient sovereign’s lack of
success.
Time will tell which
turns out to be true.
But if I were a
betting man, I know which outcome I’d put my money on.
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