OF SLOWER BOATS AND FASTER FISHING

About a week ago, I was invited to speak at a local fishing club, to give them an update about changes in the regulations and laws that might affect their fishing.  After all of the upcoming changes to this year’s regulations were fully discussed, the conversation inevitably arrived at the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2017 or, as it’s better known, the infamous “Modern Fish Act.”

I described how that legislation sought to abolish annual catch limits recreational fisheries, and delay the rebuilding of important recreational stocks, with an aside about how Modern Fish Act supporters celebrated the recreational overfishing of Gulf of Mexico red snapper this year.  By the time I was done, I saw a roomful of folks shaking their heads, with more than one asking something like “How can the industry be so stupid, to put their own futures at risk?”

The way I explained it, in a bit less detail, went a little something like this:

I’ve been fishing for a very long time.

How long?  

Let’s just say that when I started kindergarten in the fall of ’59, I already sort-of knew how to cast.  I wasn’t good at it, but I could stand on the shore of a local town park and put my pieces of sandworm out where flounders could find them with a minimum of backlashes (because yes, I was using a revolving-spool reel—and old Pfleuger Trump that still resides in my basement somewhere).

In the 58 years that have passed since then, I’ve seen a lot of things change.  Boats are faster.  Tackle is better.  

Electronics that weren’t even dreamed of in the Sputnik era are now—well, let’s put it this way:  I’ve got a color depthfinder with “structure scan” and GPS set up on a canoe…

And all of those changes affect how we view the biggest change of all—how we perceive a “good day” of fishing.

Back in the ‘60s, anglers seemed to have the odds set against them, and yet they caught fish—and caught them in numbers—largely without fishfinders, GPS (or its predecessor LORAN), graphite rods, braided lines or boats that cruised at 30-knots-plus. 

Angling was primarily local; when I was young, my father bought an 18-foot Lyman Islander, a lapstrake wooden boat with a 60-horsepower engine.  While small by today’s standards, it was the biggest boat allowed to tie up at the town dock back then; anything larger had to be moored in open water.  It seemed a generation beyond the 14-foot rowboats that made up most of the fleet.

We rarely fished more than two or three miles from the dock, and a trip from our Connecticut shore “all the way” across the Sound to Long Island seemed, at the time, almost like a crossing to Europe.  Yet we caught all the fish that we wanted, and more.

We caught winter flounder year-round, or at least any time but the actual winter, when the boats were on land and the harbors locked in ice.  There was no need to chum, or to look for bars and holes on an LCD display; during spring and fall seasons, you just went onto the “flats”—mud-bottomed expanses alongside the dredged channel—tossed out an anchor and dropped down your bait, and the flounder would come.  Usually by the pailfull, sometimes by the bushel and sometimes—when things were slow—just by the dozen or two.

Go to the same places today, at the same times, and you’d be lucky to land just two.  Not two pailfulls, not two dozen, just two.  And if everybody aboard got their two fish, you’d say that you did really well.

I talked about that sort of thing to the club, and about what “good fishing” and what that really means.

We tend to say we had a “good day” when we catch a lot of fish and, if we’re talking about foodfish species like black sea bass, haddock, rockfish or snapper, when we come back to the dock with a cooler that is substantially heavier than it was in the morning.  On those good days, we’ll thoughtlessly comment that “there’s a lot of fish out there” without thinking about how far we had to travel, and how much time, fuel and other resources we had to expend to have that success.

In a lot of cases, if we stopped to think about it, we’d realize that we’re working a lot harder, going a lot farther and expending a lot more resources than we used to, in order to catch the same number of fish.

That should cause us a bit of concern.

Last summer, when the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission held meetings on new, more restrictive tautog management measures, party and charter boat captains flooded the New York meeting in an undisciplined mob, cursing and complaining that such measures weren’t needed, because “There are plenty of blackfish [another, local name for tautog] in Long Island Sound!” 

A party boat captain who sails out of Huntington, which sits almost directly across the Sound from my one-time Connecticut home, talked at great length about how many fish his customers were catching, and how healthy he believed the population to be.

I was the only person in the room who appeared to disagree, and who supported more restrictive measures.  Based on my experience, the population has, in fact, crashed.  I have a friend in Connecticut who I’ve fished with since the ‘70s; he gave up fishing for tautog a few years ago, because they had grown so scarce.

At first, I was disgusted with the other folks in the room, thinking that they were just denying reality so that they could milk a few more dollars out of a declining resource before fish grew too scarce to exploit.  But as I thought about it a little more, I realized that we were just seeing things from very different perspectives.

I started fishing for tautog decades ago, when the fish were very abundant and not subject to much fishing pressure.  They were the “big game” of my youth, before striped bass and bluefish became regular targets.  During the spring and the fall, we caught dozens of them from shore, and when we targeted them from a boat, no depthfinder or GPS was needed; we just anchored up over any rocky bottom or, when we were being extra diligent, maybe used some rough shore bearings to get closer to a particular pile of stones.  And we caught tautog by the scor.

You can’t do that anymore.  But if you’re a good fisherman—and the party and charter boat fishermen at the ASMFC meeting were, if nothing else, very good fishermen—and you have a good set of GPS numbers for some wrecks and rockpiles, you can still anchor up over structure that holds enough fish to keep your customers busy.  That doesn’t mean that there are “plenty” of fish around; it just means that someone who knows how to catch tautog, buys good equipment and knows how to use it, can still catch some fish when the population is down.

Their success leads them to believe that there are still a lot of fish around and, often, that scientists don’t know what they’re doing when they say that the stock is depleted and in need of additional protection.

Perhaps worse, they believe that the current state of the fishery is normal, and forget how much more abundant fish used to be—and could be again, if managers are given the power to do the right thing.

Scientists call it the “shifting baseline syndrome.”  The phrase was first used by Daniel Pauly in 1995, who wrote that

“each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes.  When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline.  The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species…”

What is true for fisheries scientists is even more true for fishermen, who have their views of abundance distorted not only by time, but by improvements in boats, techniques and gear that allow them to catch a larger percentage of what few fish remain.

I see the "syndrome" affect people's view of the southern New England cod fishery.  I first codfished out of Rhode Island in the 1960s, aboard the Sea Squirrel, an old party boat that took 2 ½ hours to travel from the harbor at Galilee to Cox’ Ledge, about 25 miles offshore.  We had non-stop fishing that day, and my father shared the “pool”—the prize for the biggest fish of the day—with another passenger after they landed an identical pair of 35-pound cod.

I fished out of Galilee on a regular basis for many years after that, but never saw a pool fish smaller than those two 35-pounders.  Yet today, when I hear news of “great” codfishing out of Rhode Island, I’m hearing about so-called “market cod”—fish under 10 pounds—and pool fish that, more often than not, barely break 20.

In the old days, that sort of fishing would have made me stay home…

Offshore fisheries provide even more extreme examples.

Here on Long Island, there are still active anglers who used to chase tuna from slow wooden boats that cruised at around 10 knots.  Lacking electronics, they called the NA Buoy which, until it was removed by the Coast Guard a few years ago, sat just 12 miles offshore, the “Confidence Buoy” because, when they saw it, they were finally confident that they knew where they were.  

Those old boats didn’t stray too far from the inlets, but they once caught plenty of tuna throughout the summer

Today, Long Island fishermen often run forty, fifty or sixty miles to catch a few bluefin, and when they do, they say that “fishing is really good…”

When I used to fish out of Rhode Island, the party boats all carried harpoons on board, in case they came across a swordfish finning out on the surface on their way to Cox’s Ledge.  

Back then, finning swordfish were common, and those fish were good-sized.  Today, we’re told that swordfish are again abundant, but the sight of one finning out close to shore is a very rare thing; back then, no one posed for photos with sub-100 pound “rats;” the sort of little swords that too often appear in present-day “hero shots.”

As for white marlin, I baited my first at the Whistle Buoy, just off Block Island, and remember when they sometimes finned within sight of Fire Island Inlet, New York.  You don't see them so close to shore any more.

Those of us who chase billfish and tuna are now told that, because we

“have to travel longer distances than [our] southern counterparts to get to the numerous canyons that dot the 100-fathom curve”

in order to find such fish, we need boats with

“fuel tanks…anywhere from 350 to 1,000 gallons…[and a] 12-hour cruising range or more.”

Modern-day writers conveniently ignore the fact that past generations could catch their billfish and tuna from a 30-foot wooden boat, with a single gas engine, that never strayed more than 20 miles from shore.

Thus, I explained to the club, the industry focuses on full coolers rather than full oceans, and tries to weaken American fishery laws, knowing full well that in order to fill those coolers, anglers will need to purchase bigger boats, better electronics and more sophisticated tackle, in order to be able to get to and harvest whatever remains of diminished fish stocks. 

But conservationists, and we anglers who still can recall the abundance of seasons long past, want to keep the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act strong, so that future generations can also enjoy the kind of quality angling we knew back in the days when boats were ill-equipped and slow, but fishing was fast, yet still close to home.