DIMINISHING RETURNS

 

I didn’t fish as much as I wanted to this spring.  The season started out well, with a run to a couple of offshore wrecks toward the end of April, but on the way home I noticed a leak in my hydraulic steering, and between turkey season and some traveling, I didn’t get it fixed until toward the end of May, when I learned that someone, earlier in the life of the boat, must have faced the same problem, decided to fix it themselves, and ended up putting the main seal in backwards, resulting in a repair that didn’t last quite as long as it should have.

I finally managed to get out yesterday, finding the predawn bay covered in fog that knocked visibility down to a hundred or so yards and forced me to throttle back and trust GPS and radar to get me to where I was headed, turning what should have been a 25-minute run into a 2-hour trek.  By the time that I got to the grounds, I had lost the tide, and spent an hour or so in fruitless casting until the current picked up and began running out.  But by that time, it was already close to nine in the morning, and there was work to be done, so my wife and I began fishing our way back toward the dock.

Between the fog and the slack tide, it wasn’t a productive trip.  We had hoped to find a few weakfish, which have been slowly increasing in numbers over the past few years, and maybe a bluefish or two.  As it was, we saw another boat net something of very modest size—we were too far away to see what it was, although I’m guessing weakfish—and my wife had a couple of hits that were certainly blues, as they sheared away the back end of her soft plastic lure.

But then again, it hasn't been a particularly productive season so far--for anyone.  There have been a few striped bass, some decent, if on-and-off, fishing for bluefish, and an acceptable showing of weaks, but fluke have been spotty and legal fluke scarce.  

I live fairly close to Captree State Park, which hosts a large party and charter boat fleet.  The folks who run the boats are, for the most part, capable captains who have years of experience fishing local waters, and can usually find fish if there are any around.  The boats themselves range from slow, vintage hulls dating back many decades, which usually remain in the bay, to large, modern vessels that can fish anywhere between their dock and the edge of the continental shelf.

Thus, when I'm not catching too much and want a fast snapshot of what’s going on, I often take a look at the party boats’ fishing reports, which generally provide a rosy review of what people are catching.

One fleet’s (two boats') report for the last few days read like this:  Yesterday,

“Today’s 7AM trip caught 29 fluke to 5.46 LBS…Today’s 1pm trip had 6 fishermen.  They caught 1 Fluke, 2 Bluefish, 1 Weakfish and 5 Cape Shark [the boat’s favorite euphemism for dogfish, either spiny or smooth].  Tonight’s 6pm trip caught 6 Striped Bass, 2 Bluefish and 1 Weakfish.”

For May 30, the same boat reported,

“Today’s 7am trip caught 8 Fluke.  Today’s 1pm trip caught 2 Fluke and 4 Bluefish.  Tonight’s 6pm trip caught 1 Striper and 3 Bluefish.”

And then there was Memorial Day (which, to be fair, was very windy):

“…Today’s 7am trip caught 2 Fluke, 6 Hake, 50 seabass [which, being out of season, had to be released], 2 mackerel and 15 Cape Shark.  Tonight’s 6pm trip is cancelled for lack of interest.  Today’s 1pm trip caught 2 Fluke…”

That’s not exactly setting the world on fire.  Of course, no matter where you might be, fishing isn’t always good; two weeks ago, things seemed a bit better.  On May 15

“Today’s 7am trip caught 22 Fluke, 2 Sea Robins, 2 Cape Shark and 1 Sand Tiger Shark.  Tonight’s 6PM trip is cancelled due to lack of interest.  Today’s 1pm trip caught 12 Fluke and 1 Bluefish.”

On May 16,

“…Today’s 7am trip caught 11 Fluke, 1 Bluefish and 2 Cape Shark.  Today’s 1pm trip caught 2 Fluke, 1 Bluefish, and 1 Blowfish.  Tonight’s 6pm trip caught 3 Weakfish, 1 Striped Bass, and 1 Cape Shark.”

And for May 17,

“…Today’s 1pm trip is cancelled…Tonight’s 6pm trip is cancelled due to lack of interest.  Today’s 7am trip caught 5 Fluke, 2 Sea Robins, and 1 Cape Shark.”

Arguably better action than the last few days, but still not particularly good.  And it’s important to note that while the report notes how many fluke and striped bass were caught, it didn’t mention how many were large enough that they might have been legally kept (as I noted above, these reports tend to be rosy). 

That makes a big difference, particularly with “meat fish” such as fluke.

While there were better days—on May 2, one boat, carrying 11 anglers, reportedly caught 125 striped bass, with every person aboard taking home a legal fish, while on May 3, a dozen fishermen were said to have caught 48 fluke up to 5.42 pounds—the fishing has been, by and large, unspectacular.

It’s actually been that way for some years.

Today's fishing is a stark contrast to the way it was when I first moved to Long Island in 1983.  Back then, May was the month when it all broke wide open.

Winter flounder were still widely available.  As the bay warmed, flounder would move out of the backwaters and into the main channels, with what seemed to be most of the fish eventually moving out of the inlets and into the ocean.  Throughout the month, both private and for-hire boats intercepted the concentration of fish, taking what we now know was far too many flounder home. 

That fishery collapsed long ago, and no longer exists.

As winter flounder were exiting the bays, summer flounder were rolling in.  I still remember my first May morning in Fire Island Inlet, back in '84.  We had just moved my boat to the South Shore, and I was just begining to feel out the water, drifting through the inlet on the outgoing tide, using supermarket squid for bait.  While I don’t recall exactly how many fluke I caught that morning, I recall that it was probably something like eight or ten or maybe a dozen—more than the number of fish supposedly caught by the entire boat in some of the reports reproduced above.

Granted, the fluke are bigger these days—back in the ‘80s, the size limit was just 14 inches, yet we still mostly caught undersized fish—but they are also significantly harder to come by during most of the year.

Then there were blackfish (a/k/a tautog).  In the mid1980sBack then, there were enough blackfish around to justify a May season; in fact, in the ’80s, there was no closed season at all.  Anglers could find fish on mussel beds and around hard structure within the bay, while those willing to take a ride to an inshore wreck—the Roda, which sits partially exposed at low tide off eastern Nassau County, was my favorite at the time—often managed to catch a good mess of fish.  Today, theNew York Bight blackfish stock remains overfished, and the season is closed during May, in part to protect spawning fish.

And, of course, there were bluefish, flooding into the bays as the water warmed.  Little fish—up to five pounds or so—might pop up anywhere between the inlets and the backwaters, while larger blues stacked up in the inlets when the outgoing tide brought warm water, or lay quiet on the flats, unseen but willing to explode on a surface plug splashing over their heads.

There are still some blues moving through—we had some fairlyu big fish this year, and some fairly big schools of small ones—but nothing like it was years ago, when so many bluefish chased bait in the bay that there weren’t enough terns and laughing gulls to wheel and feed over every separate school.

Just outside the inlets, in the early part of the month, a vast body of Atlantic mackerel streamed past, so many fish that anglers using multi-hooked rigs caught them three, four, even five at a time, and could fill a freezer with shark and tuna bait in just one or two trips.

We haven’t seen those big mackerel schools in more than 30 years.

Yet, to me, those fish are all sideshows, for May has always belonged to the weakfish.

There are still some around.  Although the population has fallen to very low numbers, for reasons that scientists haven’t completely discerned (one recent hypothesis concerns increasing predation by bottlenose dolphins), it has made a comeback in recent years,  In Great South Bay, at least, we’re probably seeing more, if somewhat smaller, fish than we have at any point since the late 1990s.  As a result, it’s not unusual to see a score or more boats on the traditional weakfishing grounds.

Yet that is, again, a far cry from what it looked like in ’84, when portions of Great South Bay resembled a mooring area, because so many boats were drifting for weakfish in the first grey light before dawn.

All told, the fishing on the South Shore of Long Island is badly diminished from what it was forty years ago.  We may have faster boats, better electronics, and more technologically advanced tackle to support our quest, but even with such assistance, we have to work harder to catch fewer fish.

One of my closest and oldest friends, who has fished with me for near 50 years, often comments that if he was young, and had to start over again, he doesn’t know whether he’d get into fishing.  He admits that maybe—just maybe—he might buy a kayak, but given how badly fishing has declined, he’s not sure that it would be worth getting into the sport, and spending the many thousands of dollars he's spent on boats and fishing gear, just to partake of a badly diminished resource.

The one exception to that diminution, of course, is striped bass, which even in their current, overfished state are far more abundant than they were in ’84.  But fisheries managers at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission managed to fully rebuild the stock by the mid-1990s, and even though we’re not seeing the abundance we saw twenty years ago, after the stock had been completely restored, there are enough fish around to keep people happy—for now.

Although still overfished, the population is rebuilding slowly, but a combination of increased recreational landings and poor recruitment in the Chesapeake Bay—the single most important spawning area on the coast—will cause it to go into further decline if current regulations remain intact, beginning around 2027.  The ASMFC has taken steps to prevent thatfrom happening, but as of now, not all states—and New York is one of the laggards—have implemented the emergency management measures, and it’s hard to predict what shape the pending Addendum II is going to take.

One thing that is probably certain is that New York’s anglers, as well as its angling-related businesses, can’t afford to lose the striped bass, which has now become the most popular saltwater recreational fish in the state.  Last year, New York anglers took over 5.8 million trips primarily targeting striped bass, which was more than a third of all saltwater fishing trips taken by such anglers.  No other species comes close (summer flounder, at 3.1 million trips, was next in line).

Over the years, New York anglers have experienced continually diminishing returns on their investments in recreational fishing.  They’ve lost the winter flounder, lost the spring blackfish season, lost the Atlantic mackerel.  Fluke, bluefish, and weakfish are still around, but in much lower numbers.  Farther offshore, we lost the spring pollock run at Block Island 35 years ago, local cod are not doing well, and mako sharks are faring so badly that they must be released; shark fishermen no longer head offshore on Memorial Day weekend, vying to catch that first mako.

If we lose the striped bass, then a lot of young anglers may very well feel that it’s no longer worth spending money on fish that are no longer there.  There will be very little reason for new anglers—young or old—to enter the sport, and good reason for many existing anglers to find a new pastime.

Yet more than a few people in New York’s angling industry oppose the emergency striped bass measures, which don’t impose seasons when people can’t fish, but merely carve a few inches off the top of the current slot limit, so that a legal fish must measure between 28 and 31 inches, rather than the current 28 to 35.  Such people fear that such measures might cost them some business.

And maybe they will.

But losing a little is still better than losing everything. 

Given the current importance of striped bass to New York’s recreational fishery, if poor recruitment and excessive harvest combine to cause a new stock collapse, the collapse of the state’s recreational fishing industry probably won’t be too far behind.