A BUNKER MENTALITY

 

The National Fisherman magazine recently reported that

“Chesapeake Bay menhaden fishing protesters in small craft continue to harass Ocean Harvesters boats and fishermen by circling in front of the firms’ [sic] steamers attempting to keep the boats from making sets.”

For those who still sometimes have trouble keeping all the players straight, Ocean Harvesters is the United States company that owns all of the big reduction fishery purse seiners operating on the East Coast (along with others operating in the Gulf of Mexico), and sells all of the fish that it catches to Omega Protein, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Canadian aquaculture and ocean products company Cooke, Inc.).

Monty Diehl, Ocean Harvesters’ chief executive officer complained that

“Over the past three years we have seen a few dozen of these recreational fishing boats racing to get in front of us and just circling so we either can’t get to where we want to go, or to try and block us from setting our nets…

“These go hand-in-hand with the threats we get on socia media and the coordinated effort to disrupt our operations.

“We have notified Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) on a few occasions when these things happen, but if we can’t get the registration number from the boat, then VMRC does not have anything to go on, and most of these interactions happen quickly, and after a few minutes these folks leave, probably realizing that VMRC may be coming out.”

That sort of behavior garnered significant public attention three years ago, when someone riding a jet ski—very possibly an angler or someone concerned with conservation issues in the Chesapeake Bay—engaged in targeted harassment against commercial menhaden vessels.  As described in The National Fisherman,

“As an Ocean Harvesters crew was making a set, the rider of the jet ski ran his boat between the two purse boats and was able to get inside the set and out before the set was completed…

“The jet skier rode inside the net, sprayed the crew with his wake, and yelled obscenities at them, according to an account by the Menhaden Fisheries Coalition…”

 It’s difficult to understand how anyone could consider such behavior even marginally acceptable.

People are free to dislike the menhaden reduction fishery.

They are free to try to have the fishery pushed out of the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps pushed out of Virginia waters, and maybe even legislated out of existence.  They are free to ask fishery managers to reduce the menhaden quota, place restrictions on when it may be landed, and/or allocate some or all of the reduction fleet quota, which is held solely by the Commonwealth of Virginia, to be reallocated to other states and to other sectors of the menhaden fishery.

But what people are not free to do is risk the safety, and perhaps even the lives, of menhaden fishermen by recklessly operating watercraft near their vessels, showering them with water, and trying to prevent them from pursuing what is, up to now, a completely legal fishery, cooperatively managed through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

Virginia legislators recognized that truth after the jet ski incident, and passed legislation making knowingly and intentionally impeding commercial fishing activity, or impeding the commercial fishing activity of a commercial fishing vessel, a Class I misdemeanor, punishable by as much as 12 months in prison and/or a $2,500 fine.  The legislation had extremely broad support, passing by a vote of 99-0 in the House and 39-1 in the Senate.

Ocean Harvesters’ Diehl said that the legislation

“greatly reduced the number of incidents [of people harassing the company’s reduction boats] for that 2024 fishing season, but it started back up in 2025.”

Why?

It’s a given that the reduction fishery is disliked by both Virginia anglers and much of the conservation community in the Chesapeake Bay.  The boats are big, they’re easy to spot when they’re fishing, and they kill a lot of fish at one time.  Plus, over the years, the menhaden industry has sometimes acted with high-handed arrogance, such as it did back in 2019, when it ignored the ASMFC’s then-new 51,000 metric ton Bay Cap on reduction industry landings, and announced toward the end of that summer that it was going to exceed that limit in the Bay waters off Virginia, which had not yet put the Cap in place.

But there are a lot of fishing activities that aren’t particularly popular with anglers and various conservation groups.  Depending on where and when it’s going on, and what fish are affected, gill netting, pelagic longlining, bottom and midwater trawls, and even things like pinhooking striped bass have received their share of fairly vehement criticism, but you generally don’t see recreational fishermen aggressively harassing vessels engaged in such activity.

The menhaden reduction fishery, though, is different.  I can recall how it was more than 50 years ago, when I was still in my teens and growing up on western Long Island Sound, and the reduction boats were operating off the western Connecticut coast.  There was a special hostility directed at them that even the fishermen poaching striped bass for market— Connecticut was the first “gamefish” state on the coast—were spared.  Some particularly aggressive anglers went so far as to find cracked automobile engine blocks, and weld chains and grappling hooks to them, in the hope that when the “bunker boats” set their purse seines in the Sound’s shallow waters, they would reach all the way to the bottom, get snarled by the makeshift booby traps, and ruin the attempted sets and hopefully ruin the nets as well.

Since then, angler attitudes have only gotten worse.

I have to believe that the various menhaden advocacy groups are responsible for much of that, not only fanning the flames but perhaps also igniting them in an already highly combustible angling community.

That doesn’t mean that the advocates don’t make good points.

Menhaden are an important forage fish, preyed upon by other fish, marine mammals, and piscivorous birds.  When they are scarce or absent from a particular place, the ecosystem responds by placing greater demands on other forage species, by predators changing their behavior and, if some research is to be accepted at face value, by reduced reproductive success.

It is possible, although not yet proven, that intense local fishing activity can cause “localized depletion” of the menhaden population, perhaps particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, and result in a cascade of negative impacts.  The current Chesapeake Bay Cap on reduction fishery harvest is a precautionary measure intended to minimize the likelihood of such depletion occurring, and the ASMFC’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board is currently holding hearings on whether the Bay Cap should be reduced from its current 51,000 metric ton level.

And, last year, a stock assessment found that, due to errors in previous assessments, menhaden fecundity (used as a proxy for spawning stock biomass) was significantly smaller than previously believed, and that the fishing mortality rate experienced by the stock was significantly higher, although the stock was not yet overfished nor experiencing overfishing.

There are legitimate scientific arguments that can be made to reduce overall menhaden landings, including both the landings of the reduction fleet and the landings of the growing segment of the menhaden industry who supply menhaden as bait.

But that’s not the way the menhaden advocates are operating.  Instead of focusing on the scientific arguments, they spend most of their efforts in making emotional appeals that revile the reduction fleet, with criticisms based not on hard data, but rather on the size of its vessels or the nationality of its customers.

Consider a group that calls itself “The Forage Fish Campaign.”  Its web page declares that

“Industrial fishing vessels are stripping billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, shad, and river herring from American coastal waters every year—collapsing ecosystems, destroying livelihoods, and shipping the profits overseas…

“Industrial fishing operations are extracting billions of pounds of menhaden, herring, mackerel, and shad every year from American waters.  Not for food.  Not for bait.  The great majority is for industrial processing—ground into meal and oil, shipped overseas to feed foreign fish farms and factory livestock.  [emphasis added]”

It ends with the declaration

“This.  Stops.  Now.”

The message is clearly intended to foment public animosity toward the large-volume, low-value (per-pound) fisheries that typically target forage species, including menhaden.  After all, they are “industrial fishing operations,” that ship their profits overseas, and often sell product to foreign fish farms and factory livestock operations.

What red-blooded American wouldn’t despise the sort of folks who do that?

Perhaps someone who actually understood biology and fisheries management.

From a biological standpoint, it makes no difference to a fish stock whether it is caught by a handful of “industrial” vessels, or by a relative multitude of small-scale fishermen.  So long as the stock is not subject to overfishing—and the last stock assessment made it clear that menhaden are not—it doesn’t matter to the fish whether they are killed by a big net or a small one.

A menhaden killed by a tackle shop owner tossing a cast net is just as dead as one killed by a reduction boat.  Its removal from the population has the same impact.

But the reduction boats are just bigger, more attractive targets for the advocates’ bile.  Something that they hope they can convince people to hate.

The references to “shipping the profits overseas” and shipping fish overseas to be used as feed in “foreign” fish farms follows a similar logic.  The idea is to convince people that the “industrial” fleet is engaged in activities that, at their core, are somehow un-American. 

Of course, such comments ignore the fact that Ocean Harvesters is an American—not a foreign—company, and that the boats are crewed by American fishermen who spend their income from the fishery supporting American families, buying or renting American real estate, and patronizing American stores in their home towns. 

And while most of the menhaden are shipped overseas, no one, other than some people trying to minimize trawler bycatch, seems concerned that the Alaskan walleye pollock trawl fishery—the largest single fishery in the United States, when measured by poundage caught—ships the majority of its product overseas (or that those 3 billion tons of pollock that are landed each year are caught by “industrial” boats).

That sort of anti-foreign rancor is generally saved for the menhaden reduction fleet.

Similarly, The Forage Fish Campaign seems bound to attack the reduction industry because the menhaden it catches are used “Not for food.  Not for bait,” but rather for aquaculture and agricultural feeds, which again might be good for growing hostility against the reduction industry, but makes no logical sense.

After all, there aren’t many people in the United States who will want to use menhaden for food, and it’s not clear why using menhaden for bait—bait that is used to catch what are essentially luxury species such as lobster or blue crabs—is a higher and better use of the menhaden resource than using it to feed the Atlantic salmon imported from Canada or Norway or Scotland and eaten by millions of Americans, or using it to feed the birds raised on “factory livestock” farms to produce your kids’ chicken nuggets.

Once more, it’s all provocative language intended to create hostility toward a particular fishery, which makes no logical sense at all.

Still, that provocative language works.  We see far too many anglers blaming the reduction fishery—not the entire menhaden fishery, but the reduction fishery alone—for every ill that besets coastal fisheries, from a lack of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay to the current state of the striped bass population.

And for some, whether cursed with poor judgment, psychological problems, or a strong taste for alcohol, their hostility for the reduction fleet turns from mere disdain to the sort of directed harassment that Diehl describes and the Virginia legislature tried to prevent. 

It’s not unlikely that somewhere down the road, some angler is going to do something stupid and threaten, harass, or otherwise interfere with a reduction boat when law enforcement happens by, and the new, stricter Virginia criminal sanctions will be applied for the first time.  And, unfortunately, it is very possible that, at some point, some angler is going to do something stupid and someone—maybe the angler, maybe a menhaden fisherman, maybe both, maybe someone else—is going to be injured or killed.

And that angler, and maybe some injured party, is going to pay the price.

But it will be those who warped people’s perceptions, intentionally whipped up the public’s emotions, and fomented increasing hostility against the menhaden industry, who will truly deserve the blame.