MID-ATLANTIC FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL GETS SERIOUS ABOUT RECREATIONAL LAWBREAKERS

Readers of this blog are undoubtedly familiar with Carlos Rafael, the so-called “Codfather” of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who ran an extensive criminal enterprise built around illegal groundfish harvest.

And a lot of the folks in the striped bass community were seeing red when, a decade or so ago, state and federal law enforcement officers broke up a multi-million-dollar striped bass poaching operation down in Chesapeake Bay.

Those big poaching busts capture most of the headlines.  

They also serve to obscure the smaller, but far more common, incidents of illegal harvest that are going on all of the time, with much of that poaching committed by recreational fishermen.

Sometimes, when anglers get too far out of line, such poaching does make the news.  That was the case here on Long Island a little over a year ago, when state and federal law enforcement boarded two different Montauk party boats within just a few weeks of each other, and found that both had large quantities of illegal black sea bass on board.

As it turns out, such poaching isn’t limited to Montauk, and it isn’t just a sometime thing.  Speaking at the March 2018 meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, Lt. Sean Reilly, a law enforcement officer for the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, noted that poaching by party boat patrons is a problem all along the Long Island coast.  The Marine Resources Advisory Council’s Bulletin for that month summarized his comments by saying

“Officer Reilly of the DEC Law Enforcement stated that unclaimed coolers are a large part of the problem.  Once Enforcement agents are spotted, coolers are abandoned.  They can contain as many as 130 fish.  Another large problem is that the vessel trip report doesn’t always match up to the number of fish caught.”

But how do you make those problems go away?

One suggestion is to make the boat’s captain legally responsible for all fish caught by his or her passengers.  But that’s not a solution that’s very popular with the party boat fleet, even though it is one that is enforced on other parts of the coast.

The most serious objection to holding the captains responsible is the fact that some party boat patrons—and, perhaps, this is particularly true of the patrons who poach—are unpleasant people, who wouldn’t shy away from violence if told to open their coolers against their will.  Some crewmembers at the Advisory Council meeting related stories of being threatened by anglers who were asked to display their catch.  (Although there is a some irony to such stories, given that the Internet tough guys who threaten to beat someone “within a half-inch of his life” for supporting various conservation measures on a Facebook page apparently turn into meek little church mice when faced with the possibility of a real physical confrontation with a hardcase poacher on the decks of their own boats.)

On the other hand, many of the party boat captains present at the meeting were completely amenable to a regulation requiring each angler’s cooler to be tagged with a name and address, so that law enforcement could identify who owned coolers left behind with too many fish inside.  However, there was no discussion of how anyone could, as a practical matter, verify that the cooler tags contained accurate information, or of who would bear the penalty should law enforcement board a boat and find untagged coolers, filled with illegal fish, abandoned on board.

And then there’s the problem of the vessel trip reports.  

Federal regulations require party and charter boats that fish for a number of species, including black sea bass, scup, bluefish and summer flounder, to file such vessel trip reports, which must include, among much other information,

“hail weight in pounds (or count of individual fish, if a party or charter vessel), by species, of all species…landed or discarded”

during the course of each trip.  For-hire vessels fishing for species managed by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council must completely fill out their vessel trip reports before such vessel returns to the dock, and file them electronically. 

Failing to timely fill out an accurate trip report places a vessel operator in legal jeopardy, and it’s hard to think of a way that such an operator could fill out an accurate trip report without knowing what was in his passengers’ coolers—which is why DEC enforcement folks are running into multiple problems when boarding certain boats.  

Thus, it seems that, one way or another, crews might have to start looking under the lids of everyone’s coolers if they want to stay on the right side of the law.

The vessel owners and operators aren’t going to like that fact, but it seems that, at some point in the future, they might not have much choice, as the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council appears serious about finding effective ways to reduce poaching in the party boat fleet.  On November 13 and 14, the Council will be holding a Law Enforcement/For-Hire Workshop in Philadelphia, where

“Operator versus angler (client) responsibility for fisheries violations that occur on for-hire vessels and law enforcement options for enforcing these”

will be one of two topics on the agenda.  

Any recommendations arising out of the workship will be forwarded on to the Council for discussion at its December meeting, and possible adoption if such is deemed warranted.

But private-boat anglers shouldn’t be breathing easy and thinking that they dodged a bullet this time, because their widespread poaching is on the Workshop’s agenda, too.

And in their case it’s not, for the most part, the small-boat inshore bottom fishermen that are at the core of the problem, but a group of anglers that includes the big-boat, high-roller crowd.  It’s the people who call themselves “recreational fishermen” but sell part or all of their catch, and are thus really a subset of the commercial sector.  However, they generally lack commercial fishing licenses and, even if they have them—particularly in the case of offshore anglers who hold General Category Atlantic Tunas permits—they lack the safety equipment that the Coast Guard requires all commercial boats to carry.

We’ve all seen it.  There’s a good run of bluefin offshore—even bluefin below the legal commercial size—and suddenly there’s a surge of boats running out of the inlet and putting the fish on ice.  Legal limits often go out the window.  Boats bring a dozen large school fish back to the dock, and when somebody raises the bag limit issue, they point to the tuna’s finlets and say “Look!  They’re yellow.  These aren’t bluefin, they’re yellowfin, and we can take three apiece.”  Whether they’re really that dumb, or just playing dumb, is open to question, but they’re breaking the law just the same.

And there’s little question that they know that they can’t sell the fish and still be in accord with the rules. 

Last year, I told the story of my wife and I going into aBay Shore restaurant, and the waiter trying to sell us a “special’ bluefindish.  When I asked how big the tuna was,he quickly said “110 pounds,” a weight that was far to small for any fish thatmade the 73-inch commercial minimum size.  The waiter said that the fish had come straight from Montauk, and maybe it was poached out there, but it was hard to ignore the fact that there were a lot of tuna in the same size range being caught south of Long Island just then, and that quite a few of the boats that caught them were moored only a mile or two from the restaurant in question.

That sort of thing needs to stop, but so does the general lawlessness that we see every time there’s a good tuna bite—whether bluefin, yellowfin or bigeye—when everyone from truck drivers to teachers to wealthy physicians and real estate folks load up on fish, then unload them on the market.  Some of the boats, particularly the large ones, do have commercial permits, but a lot of them don’t, and very few of them have all of the required commercial gear.

And that’s a bad thing, because all of those hobby-caught fish, when they’re brought to market—whether through the front door of a licensed dealer or the back door of a local shop or restaurant—are competing with legitimate commercial fishermen’s landings, driving down prices from folks who are properly licensed and trying to market their fish in the right way.

Which is why the enforcement folks at the Philadelphia Workshop, and later the Mid-Atlantic Council, want to look at the issue.

It’s a big ocean, and a long coastline.  And there’s a long maritime tradition of looking the other way when smugglers, and other miscreants, practice their trade.  There are very few law enforcement agents, and the deck is badly stacked against them.

But illegal harvest steals fish from everyone, and most particularly, it steals from the honest folks that go about their business, and their recreation, without breaking the law.

For that reason, we can only hope that when the Workshop, and then the Council, talk about the recreational poaching problem, they end up talking about some viable solutions, too.