GOOD NEWS FOR ATLANTIC BLUEFIN ANGLERS

 

I’m drafting this post aboard an Amtrak train, headed from Washington back up to New York’s Penn Station, where I’ll grab another train out to Long Island.  For the last few days, I’ve been attending the spring meeting of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Highly Migratory Species Advisory Panel, where we spent much of the meeting’s first day talking about bluefin tuna.

For recreational fishermen, the news was good.

The recreational bluefin tuna fishery was in a bit of disarray last year, after unusually high landings in the General, Harpoon, and Angling categories in 2024 caused the United States to exceed its quota, established by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, by 141.2 metric tons.  78% of that overage, or 110.1 metric tons, was attributable to the Angling Category.  Because ICCAT requires that any nation that overfishes its annual ICCAT quota must pay the overage back in the following year, and because the United States allocates the payback across sectors in proportion to each sector’s overage, that meant that the 2025 Angling Category quota had to be reduced from 297.4 metric tons to just 187.3 mt.

In addition, the early season fishing for bluefin in the lower mid-Atlantic was extremely good in early 2025, leading to the Angling Category Trophy allocation for the southern region to be quickly exceeded.  There were also significant early landings in the Large School/Small Medium Category.  Because a new administration had just come into power in Washington, bringing along not only the usual bureaucratic disruption that occurs during any administration change, but also a temporary ban on all new regulations, NMFS couldn’t deal with those landings on a timely basis, leaving managers with even less Angling Category fish to work with. 

That left the managers walking a very fine line.  They wanted to let recreational fishermen catch their entire 2025 allocation, and allow the season to run as long as possible, to provide anglers along the entire East Coast a chance to participate in the fishery and so maximize social and economic returns.  At the same time, they had to be very careful not to exceed the overall 2025 quota, for ICCAT rules provided that, if any nation exceeded its quota two years in a row, that nation could be required to pay back a minimum of 125%, not merely 100%, of the overage in the following year.

NMFS ultimately adopted a 1-fish bag limit and 27- to 73-inch size limit for private boats, with an extra 27- to 47-inch bluefin for for-hire vessels, and even with those restrictive rules had to close the Angling Category fishery in early August.  A lot of fishermen, for-hire vessel operators, and folks in the fishing tackle industry were very unhappy with that outcome.

However, it turned out that NMFS knew exactly what it was doing.

We learned at the HMS Advisory Panel meeting that the Angling Category landings were just 101% of the category’s 2025 allocation, meaning that anglers were allowed to land every pound of fish that they were entitled to, but their overharvest was so small that it was essentially meaningless.  At the same time, the combined United States landings were only 94% of the adjusted 2025 quota, so we avoided exceeding the quota for a second consecutive year, and will not have to pay back any overage at all.

Thus, in 2026, the Angling Category will be able to fish on its full bluefin tuna allocation.  And the news gets better, for while the 2023, 2024, and 2025 allocations were based on an overall United States base quota of 1,341 mt, the 2026, 2027, and 2028 allocations will be based on the higher 1,490.38 mt base quota that was established at the November 2025 ICCAT meeting.

The Angling Category is allocated 22.6% of the overall United States quota, so the increase in base quota means that the Angling Category’s quota should be bumped up from 297.4 to 341.3 metric tons this year, although the regulations needed to implement the increase won’t be finalized until sometime in late summer or early fall.

Right now, the default recreational bluefin tuna regulations are in effect, which permit Angling Category vessels, including those with Charter/Head Boat permits fishing under recreational rules, to retain one bluefin between 27 and 73 inches in length each day, and one “Trophy” of 73 inches or more each year (except for boats fishing in the South Trophy region, which was closed on January 13 when its allocation was exceeded).

However, those regulations won’t be in place throughout the season.  Now that the Advisory Panel has had an opportunity to provide their thoughts on 2026 management measures, we can expect NMFS to put together a suite of rules intended to keep the season open through December 31, if that is at all possible. 

A lot of different considerations will come into play when those management measures are being drafted.

One priority is allowing anglers to fully utilize, but not exceed, their entire quota.  There is no simple formula for accomplishing that goal and, because several factors such as weather and the local availability of fish are beyond NMFS’ control, setting effective quotas is something of a mixture of art and science. 

Sector allocations, as well as the base quota itself, is measured in weight rather than in the number of fish, so regulations that focus on harvesting School category bluefin, rather than Large School and Small Medium fish, tend to favor a longer season, while those that allow a significant harvest of larger fish are more likely to lead to anglers exceeding their quota.  At the same time, once one gets up to Massachusetts and into the Gulf of Maine, School bluefin become more and more difficult to find, with larger fish dominating the fishery; School bluefin-oriented regulations can make it more difficult for northern New England anglers to harvest legal fish, making some sort of compromise necessary.

Historically, there has also been a tendency to favor for-hire vessels over private boats, on the theory that for-hire anglers are more likely to book trips if they can take more fish home.  We can expect that trend to continue in 2026.  There was also some talk at the meeting of providing party/head boats with more liberal regulations than those that govern the charter boat fleet, as the party boats carry more passengers and arguably need even more liberal regulations than the charters in order to sell trips targeting bluefin. 

In an effort to keep such special privileges from getting out of hand, perhaps to the point that they disadvantage the private boat fleet, I suggested that such special regulations be limited to a season that opens later in the year, after private vessels and traditional “six-pack” charters have had abundant opportunities to utilize the available fish.  Others made similar suggestions.

Weather is obviously out of human control, but if we get a situation where a large body of bluefin sets up close to active fishing ports for an extended period, and the weather permits anglers to take advantage of the nearby abundance, landings can spike very quickly.  It was just that sort of situation that caused the big recreational overage of 2024.  Fish concentrating in a particular area, and the resultant sharp increase in landings, can also disadvantage anglers elsewhere on the coast, as the sort of early closure of the fishery that occurred last year can keep anglers in places that traditionally host later-season fisheries to be denied access to the bluefin resource.

To avoid such outcomes, I was one of a number of Advisory Panel members who asked that managers employ regional quotas, with northern and southern regions separated by a line drawn at 39^o 18’ N, which would place the dividing line off southern New Jersey.  The current regulations already allow the use of such regions; separate quotas would help to prevent large early harvests off Virginia and North Carolina from harming northern New England anglers, whose season typically begins later in the summer, while also preventing high harvests off New Jersey, New York, and New England from depriving anglers fishing in places like Ocean City, Maryland of their fisheries, which typically begin later in the fall.

While it is impossible to say with any certainty what 2026 regulations will look like, I’m comfortable in predicting that the bag limit will be two, or perhaps three, fish for the private boats (maybe something like one or two School bluefin and one Large School/Small Medium, or possibly one fish between 27 and 73 inches, plus a second School fish), with an extra bluefin for the for-hires, and a season that will hopefully last throughout the year.

Depending on how many fish anglers land as the season progresses, it is very possible that whatever management measures are originally put in place will either be liberalized, if landings are lower than expected, or made more restrictive, if early harvests are high.  Another season closure is not out of the question, although it would probably occur in the fall, and not at the height of the summer season like it did in 2025.

The bottom line is that the regulations, whatever form they ultimately take, are likely to be significantly less restrictive than they were last year.

Before closing this post, I probably should also address something that wasn’t mentioned at the meeting—which can hopefully be viewed as a very good thing.

In April, I reported that the United States had sent a letter to ICCAT, notifying it that the U.S. would no longer be counting recreational bluefin tuna landings against its annual quota.  At the time, I noted that there was nothing in the relevant ICCAT recommendations that could reasonably be interpreted to support such action, and further noted that it seemed to violate the current ICCAT management approach, and was being condemned by other ICCAT members.  I also observed that, in order to exclude recreational landings from the United States’ quota, NMFS would have to initiate a new rulemaking that authorized such change.

No one from NMFS even alluded to, much less addressed, any such action at the Advisory Panel meeting.  The upcoming bluefin rulemaking, which would adopt the increased base quota, still allocated 22.6% of that base quota to the recreational sector, and the discussion of upcoming rulemaking did not mention any change to how NMFS might treat recreational landings vis-a-vis the U.S. quota in the future.

While the topic did not come up in the meetings, it did come up in casual conversations held among Advisory Panel members over lunch, dinner, and/or drinks.  We were all pretty much in agreement that it was better not to make any official inquiries as to whether the idea still had legs.  A few folks suggested that the person who wrote the letter is no longer in the same position at NMFS, and that maybe whoever replaced him is more then willing to let a bad idea die quietly and with no fanfare at all.

Hopefully, that is the case.

The new, higher recreational allocation, and the fact that we won’t have to be paying back any overages, suggests that 2026 (and, hopefully, 2027 and 2028) could be a very good year for recreational bluefin fishermen.

It would be a shame to screw things up now.