When I look back over the past 68 years, fishing was
probably never better than it was in the mid-1970s.
I was in college back then, spending most of the year in Worcester,
Massachusetts. The factories had mostly
shut down; old, boarded-up, sometimes burnt-out brick buildings lined the roads
outside the school. Eventually, the tech
industry would give new life to the town, but that wasn’t even a dream when I
was there; the computers of my college years were big and slow, and still read
their data from punchcards. High-tech
was a pocket calculator.
But when school let out in May, I came home to a very different world. In contrast to the dying city, that saw a few struggling businesses trying to keep their heads above water, Long Island Sound was abuzz with life.
Winter
flounder still thrived in the bays, along with a big population of eels that
teemed along the shoreline. Striped bass
were migrating in, both the dark, fin-rotted fish from the Hudson and the
bright fish from the south, still speckled with sea lice from their recent
migration; size ranged from shorts to a very, very few that weighed over 60 pounds. Tautog—we called them “blackfish”
back then—crowded into the shallows to spawn.
There were weakfish in the coves.
Atlantic mackerel swarmed in the middle of the Sound, and when they
disappeared, big weakfish took their place. Bluefish showed up around Memorial Day, with
summer flounder and scup not far behind.
For pure variety, May might have been the best month of the year, but there was no time between April and November when an angler couldn’t go out and have a very good chance of catching something. Because there were so many options, no one species received too much pressure. Flounder were hit pretty hard in the spring and the fall, and the bluefish got a lot of attention when they blitzed bunker schools in the harbors and creeks, but over the course of a year, effort was well spread out.
If the bass disappeared
for a while, or the blackfish dispersed as the water warmed, there was always another fish to take up the slack. I worked
in a tackle shop at the time, and could always put the customers on fish, if
they were willing to try something new.
It's not that way anymore.
I was thinking of that the other day, while attending a meeting of New York’s
Marine Resources Advisory Council, when some folks from the party boat fleet
started complaining about more restrictive black sea bass rules.
It’s impossible to deny that black sea bass are very
abundant; the
last stock assessment update estimates that spawning stock biomass was more
than twice the target level at the end of 2019.
Abundance always drives angling effort; recreational
fishermen are drawn to the fish that are easiest to catch. While sea bass biomass has been high in
recent years, there has been a
decline in summer flounder abundance, which fell from an estimated 62,137
metric tons in 2010 to 39,516 metric tons at the end of 2017, and has increased
to 47,397 metric tons two years later. While summer flounder are a long way from
being overfished, below-average recruitment in all but one of the years between
2011 and 2019 led to a significant decline in biomass, which now sits at 89% of
its target level.
In response to such factors, fishermen
on both private and for-hire vessels have shifted a significant amount of
effort from summer flounder to black sea bass; while current effort estimates
record such shift, they may be underestimating the actual numbers, as many
boats that are supposedly targeting summer flounder are no longer doing so in
the bays and inlets, or on deep-water lumps and other soft-bottom structure,
but rather are fishing the edges of wrecks and similar hard-bottom features,
where sea bass constitute a substantial incidental catch.
Today, some local party boats might not survive if they lost the summer black sea bass fishery; fifteen years ago, they spent most of the summer fishing closer inshore for summer flounder and, for the most part, only turned to the sea bass later in the fall, after their summer flounder fishing was done.
The relatively recent increase in black sea bass trips has led to higher landings, which frequently exceed the recreational harvest limit and even the recreational sector's annual catch limit; while such higher landings probably won’t create an
immediate problem for the stock, given its high abundance, they will allow
anglers to chip away at that abundance more quickly, and eventually drop it
down to levels where even more restrictive restrictions must be
imposed.
We
see something similar happening with scup, which also enjoy a spawning stock
biomass at about twice the target level, but which, because of low recruitment,
has been declining quickly in recent years.
However scup, unlike black sea bass, have a built-in buffer against
overfishing, as commercial landings have typically fallen well below the
commercial quota in recent years.
Other traditional nearshore bottom fish have also fallen on
hard times in recent years, with cod abundance near
all-time lows, red hake—better known as “ling” in the New York Bight—undergoing
rebuilding, and tautog limited to a very restrictive season that doesn’t
permit harvest during the summer, when most recreational fishermen are on the water.
That shifts even more effort onto black sea bass and scup.
It’s even worse inside the bay, where the collapse of the winter flounder stock removed a dependably available species. Couple the lack of winter flounder with the ban on summer tautog harvest and high size limits for summer flounder, scup, and black sea bass that make finding a legal fish inside the bay problematic, and it becomes all too clear why protected-waters anglers find themselves with little to target during the height of the summer, when most of them are on the water.
The situation has gotten bad enough that New
York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council is looking at placing restrictions on
blowfish—a/k/a “northern puffer”—one of the few species, along with
northern kingfish, that have been readily available to anglers fishing within
the bay.
We see the same pattern in fisheries for the larger inshore predators. When striped bass, bluefish, and weakfish are
all available in reasonable numbers, they split the fishing pressure among them. Some anglers prefer the challenge of fishing
for bass, while others enjoy the fast action provided by bluefish. Weakfish, rarely as abundant as the other two
species, still absorb substantial fishing effort, particularly in the spring. But in today’s environment, which sees bass and
weakfish overfished and bluefish in the midst of rebuilding (a
research track stock assessment recently found that bluefish are now at 60% of
the biomass target, but no longer overfished), that sort of flexibility no
longer exists.
Instead, anglers concentrate on whatever species is locally
abundant at any given time; recreational
landings of striped bass in 2022 were roughly twice what they were the year
before, just because bass belonging to the large 2015 year class—fish that
are badly needed to rebuild the stock—have now entered the 28- to 35-inch
recreational slot size limit, and so are vulnerable to harvest. Bluefish numbers have been low enough in most
places that they can’t provide
the bass with any sort of escape valve to mitigate the angling effort.
Back in the mid-1970s, the region’s
recreational fishing industry wasn't dependent upon a couple species of fish. Party boats could find plenty of winter flounder, summer flounder,
bluefish, and scup. Weekend warriors trying
to catch a few hours of relaxation—and maybe some dinner—aboard their own boats
had easy access to the same species, with the odd tautog or blowfish spicing up
the catch. More serious anglers haunted
the hours between dusk and dawn in search of striped bass, fished the harbor blitzes
for blues, or trolled Rebels and Redfins in the thin light before sunrise, hunting
for tiderunner weakfish.
Today, with winter flounder gone, striped bass and weakfish
overfished, bluefish and blackfish still being rebuilt, and summer flounder below its target levels, that sort of variety no longer exists. Black sea bass, scup, and even the overfished striped bass bear the brunt of recreational fishing effort. People complain about restrictive management
measures, but the truth is that just those three species can’t long endure the effects of the many
hundreds of thousands of angler trips taken each year.
To support the recreational fishery, the full panoply of recreational species must be restored.
That won’t be easy. It
won’t come without cost. But,
nonetheless, it needs to be done.
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