IMPOSING REAL BOUNDS ON THE PARTY BOAT FLEET

Ten or twelve years ago, I was down in Islamorada, and jumped aboard a local party boat for the day.

It wasn’t peak season.  

On the plus side, that meant that there weren’t many people on board the boat, and we didn’t have to jostle for a favored stern spot.  On the downside, one of the reason that there weren’t many anglers was that there weren’t too many fish, at least compared to other times of the year, and while the fishing was great, the catching was a little slow.

The boat anchored uptide of a patch reef, and tossed over a few balls of chum.  It wasn’t long before the water a few dozen yards astern began to take on a shimmering, golden hue as a swarm of yellowtail snapper, responding to the chum, rose up off the bottom.

They weren’t big fish.  Patch-reef yellowtail, living on pieces of bottom near popular ports, are fished pretty hard.  “Flag” yellowtail, as the big fish are called, are almost impossible to find there; most are a couple of inches above or below the minimum legal size.

Considering the conditions, we started out OK.  The first yellowtail of the morning are always naïve, and I was able to put a couple of half-decent fish on ice before the panicked struggles of our hooked snapper started making the rest of the school spooky.  Cero mackerel passed by, and some of them came aboard.  But as the morning wore on, the fishing inevitably slowed.

And what happened then was, perhaps, inevitable as well.

A tourist in the starboard stern corner caught an undersized yellowtail snapper.

That, in itself, was nothing new; we had been catching shorts all morning, and had been quickly dropping them back over the side.  But the tourist wasn’t following the program.  Instead of releasing his fish, he was walking it over to the cooler.

And that’s when the captain of the boat got involved.

“Where are you going with that fish?  It’s too small.  Put it back.”

That didn’t go over too well with the tourist, who responded, in the unmistakable accent of the New York Metro region,

“It’s my fish, and I can do what I want with it.”

The fact that keeping the fish was illegal seemed to be lost on the tourist, but not on the captain, who was beginning to get a little annoyed.

“I’m not going to lose my license over your fish.  Put it back in the water.”

Which led to the immediate response of

“I paid to be on this boat, and I can do what I want with my fish.”

At that point, the captain pulled out his wallet, took out the amount of the tourist’s fare, and said

“Here’s your money.  Get off the deck.  Go sit in the cabin, and never come out on this boat again.”

Because that’s how they do it down South.  I’ve fished for snapper on various party boats in the Keys and the Gulf of Mexico, and have found that the captains and mates down there take pains to obey the laws, largely because the boat can be in legal jeopardy if they do not.  And the snapper-grouper management plans don’t permit fish to be filleted at sea; nothing gets cut until it’s back at the dock, making undersized fish a lot easier for law enforcement officers to find.

It’s a little different up here.

That was illustrated recently when enforcement officers from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation boarded the party boat Fin Chaser at the dock at Star Island Marina in Montauk.

According to a report by Capt. Gene Kelly, who maintains a website dedicated to Montauk fishing,

“One of Montauk’s headboats pulled into the slip on Thursday to be greeted by a couple of guys in the green uniforms of the DEC.  They boarded the boat and started to inspect the anglers’ coolers, finding that the first one had 96 seabass, which is 93 over the legal limit.  As they continued the inspection on the starboard side, there was a massive fish kill on the port side, with dead seabass floating all over the place, and anglers who had not caught anything during the trip filing off.  After the dust cleared, there were over a dozen coolers left with no owners that held over a thousand seabass.  Since no one claimed them, ownership appeared to belong to the captain and owner of the boat.  Stay tuned.”

Those who kept up with the story soon discovered the critical nuance.  An article that appeared about a week after Capt. Kelly’s report, in the Easthampton Star, noted that

“The party boat’s customers were cited for possessing too many black sea bass and porgies, undersized black sea bass and summer flounder, and for failure to stop dumping [fish overboard] upon command.

“[The captain was] issued a violation for an incomplete trip report.  Seven other violations, each carrying a penalty of up to $250, were issued, as well as a misdemeanor charge of failure to stop dumping upon command, for which the penalty is up to $1,000 and imprisonment of up to one year.

“Environmental conservation law does not hold the owner or captain responsible for the actions of anglers on his vessel, the [Department of Environmental Conservation] spokesman said, unless officers witness them assisting with or taking responsibility for what is occurring.”

And that’s a problem, because as my story from Islamorada demonstrates, a conscientious captain is the fish’s first line of defense; he or she is the person best positioned to ensure that fishery laws are obeyed.

The problem is, the captain is always torn between conflicting motivations.  He may be a decent guy, who honestly doesn’t like to see fares poaching fish.  He may be perceptive enough to realize that overharvesting fish today may very well hurt his business in the future.  At the same time, there is a very good chance that if customers, such as the tourist and would-be poacher down in Islamorada, are told that they have to release a fish that they want to keep, they’re not going to come back on the boat any more.  And that’s a threat to future business, too.

Thus, you have the situation that a party boat mate out of Freeport, New York threw in my face one evening, when I questioned why he and the rest of his crew allowed passengers to chronically overfish the small bluefish that were than crowding into the bay.

“You think that I’m going to tell some [racial epithet deleted] that he can’t keep more than 10 fish?  That’s the difference between me making $20 and $200 in tips in a night!”

So it’s pretty clear that if regulators want the captains and crews to stop letting their passengers ignore the law, they’re going to have to give those folks some sort of incentive.

In California, for example, violations of recreational fishing regulations aboard party boats became so common that enforcement authorities conducted a year-long undercover operation targeting the captains who abetted and encouraged their passengers to violate the law.  According to the Los Angeles Times,

“Skipper Rick Powers was handcuffed by a phalanx of officers and charged with one count of felony conspiracy to violate Fish and Game laws and six misdemeanor infractions that include using illegal hooks, exceeding catch limits and keeping prohibited species…

“Later this week, state officials said, misdemeanor complaints will be filed against 13 other party boat skippers in nine counties…on a host of additional allegations that involve wounding pelicans and seals, fudging records to avoid catch limits and catching fish out of season.

“…’Wardens have been overwhelmed with complaints about party boats,’ said Warden Bob Aldrich, based in Bodega Bay.  ‘Guys who are over limit for fish get encouraged to continue fishing, and their catch is distributed to other passengers who were seasick’ or didn’t catch their limit, he said.

“No recreational anglers were targeted because they are often unaware of state regulations, officials said.  Instead, wardens went after the people who they believe should have known  better:  boat captains and crews.

“…The most troublesome violations, wardens say, include exceeding limits on the number of fish, catching undersized fish and then masking their size by filleting them before the boat returns to the dock; and [salmon-specific gear regulations].  [emphasis added]”

Some of those violations are unique to California and its particular mix of fish species, but plenty of them are going to be familiar to anyone who ever fishes from a party boat in New York or New Jersey, and some of them fit right in with the allegations arising out of the Fin Chaser incident.

If New York has a real desire to prevent such violations from occurring in its for-hire fleet, it should be making a serious effort to impose similar liability on for-hire vessels’ captains and crews.  Such liability shouldn’t be onerous—it’s practically impossible to prevent a passenger intent on poaching from secreting a couple of illegal fish into a lunch bag or other container—but if the number of illegal fish exceeds, for the sake of example, 20% of the overall catch, a presumption that the captain and crew are complicit is not unreasonable.  

After all, boats are required to submit accurate vessel trip reports for every trip made, so “I didn’t know what people caught” is not a viable excuse.

And, looking at harvest estimates provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service, it seems that such a 20% figure might cause quite a bit of grief to folks who presently consider themselves above the law. 

Using 2016 as an example, about 40% of the black sea bass harvested and sampled on party boats were less than 15 inches long—which was and still is the size limit (note that NMFS gives the measurement in terms of “fork length” and black sea bass’ tails are not forked, so it’s possible that the 40% number is a little high, depending on how the fish are measured, but even half of that would hit the theoretical 20% minimum).

That number falls to a smaller, but still significant 27% of undersized summer flounder (the same caveat on fork length applies), but jumps to 47% of scup being less than 9 inches long (the size limit is 10 inches, but scup do have forked tails, so an allowance was made for that) and then goes back down to 20% of striped bass measuring less than 26 inches (the size limit is 28 inches, but again, a generous 2-inch allowance was made for the fork in the tail, and assure that I wasn't overstating the scope of the illegal harvest).

So yes, party boats take a lot of short fish—and one has to remember that the numbers above probably reflect the minimum level of lawlessness, as anglers don’t have to let NMFS samplers measure their undersized fish, and black sea bass and scup, at least, can still be legally filleted at sea, to hide the number of illegal fish actually taken.

So making boat crews responsible for illegal activity on their vessels is a needed first step, but it is only the first one.  Requiring crews to retain the “racks,” the intact heads, tails and skeleton of filleted fish, is a good next step, to reduce the number of undersized fish filleted at sea; in New York, such rack retention is already required for striped bass and summer flounder.  Requiring all fish to be filleted on shore is an even more effective measure, that prevents racks from a previous trip to be retained to cover the inevitable shorts kept by passengers (a practice that is currently illegal but, reportedly, far from unknown).

Even so, none of the measures restricting filleting at sea would have prevented the Fin Chaser incident, as many of the illegal fish landed were still intact.  Thus, it falls back on the need to adopt rules that make violating the law too painful for the vessel and crew to risk.

Fines alone won’t do that, and in the real world, no judge is going to impose jail time for some undersized or over-limit fish, absent a long history of egregious violations.  

In the over-all scheme of things, when overworked and understaffed law enforcement agencies have difficulty covering all of the docks were violations might occur, the odds of being caught and fined are fairly remote.  That makes even a $1,000 fine just another cost of doing business.

Take the Fin Chaser as an example.  An article on the incident published in Newsday states that the boat can carry ‘more than 50 passengers” and charges each one $90 for a porgy and black sea bass trip; it was allegedly carrying 46 passengers on the day that the enforcement agents came aboard. 

But even if it only carried 40 passengers each day, the fares collected would equal $3,600—a significant sum.

Far from all of that is profit.  The boat must pay for fuel and bait, dock space, insurance and maintenance of the boat and fishing gear.  The deck crew largely works for tips, but probably also receives some fixed income to keep the boat from losing them if weather prevents sailing for a few days in a row  Even so, $1,000 spread out across the entire season—even a few fines of that size—don’t amount to much of a deterrent.

And as I note earlier, jail isn’t a realistic option .

So what is needed is a sanction that will have some teeth, and can realistically be imposed.  The answer is something that we see used far too seldom in the for-hire world, the imposition of administrative sanctions.  That basically means that, after providing the operator an opportunity to be heard, either NMFS or the State of New York—preferably both—suspend the permits the boat needs to operate for an appropriate period of time.

While a $1,000 fine might not mean very much, being tied up to the dock for two weeks during the peak of the season is going to hurt, when no income is coming in but the fixed expenses for dockage, insurance and crew are still piling up.

And the boat lying empty at the pier would provide a good example to other captains and crews thinking about crossing the line, reminding them why countenancing illegality is just not a good idea.

Right now, there’s just too much illegality going on.  It’s time for NMFS and the states to take meaningful action to get it to stop.

THE PROBLEM WITH VESSEL TRIP REPORTS

For a number of years, we’ve heard for-hire operators, and party boat operators in particular, complain that federal fishery managers require them to fill out vessel trip reports, usually referred to as “VTRs,” but then don’t consider information included on such VTRs when they perform stock assessments, calculate landings estimates or engage in similar analyses.

The National Marine Fisheries Service has recently issued a rule that will require charter and party boats in the northeast and mid-Atlantic to file their VTRs electronically, with NMFS saying that

“The time delays and inaccuracies associated with current data collection in the charter and party fishing fleets reduce our ability to use the data in making management decisions.  The action is intended to improve the data collection and improve the utility of the data.”

There have even been proposals at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council suggesting that the use of such electronic VTRs could justify reopening the black sea bass fishery during January and February, which has been closed in part because no reliable estimates of recreational landings are available from that period.

And maybe that would be possible, provided that the information provided in such vessel trip reports was accurate, and that vessels which intentionally or negligently submit inaccurate VTRs were subject to penalties harsh enough to discourage such behavior.

Unfortunately, right now, neither of those things is true.

A little over ten days ago, I was told about a party boat out in Montauk that returned to the dock with over 1,000 illegal black sea bass on board—yes, that’s over 1,000 illegal fish on a single eight or ten hour trip.  I didn’t say much about it at the time, even though the information that I received was very reliable, because I didn’t want to take even the slight chance that I might be unintentionally impugning an innocent operation, and doing someone unjustified harm.

But the facts have now been made public, so I’ll let the East Hampton Star tell the story.

“Marine enforcement officers…saw what they estimated was hundreds of pounds of fish being thrown overboard from a Montauk party boat and wound up ticketing eight people, including the boat’s captain…

“According to a [Department of Environmental Conservation] spokeswoman, the officers approached the 75-foot Fin Chaser, based on Star Island, and ordered the anglers to stop what they were doing.  Their orders were ignored…

“[The captain] was issued a violation for an incomplete trip report.  Seven other violations, each carrying a penalty of up to $250, were issued, as well as a misdemeanor charge of failure to stop dumping upon command, for which the penalty is up to $1,000 and imprisonment for up to one year.

“Details about what occurred…were made public on Sept. 5 on Capt. Gene Kelly’s website Montauksportfishing.com…

“’As they continued the inspection on the starboard side, there was a massive fish kill on the port side, with dead sea bass floating all over the place,’ Capt. Kelly wrote, with ‘anglers who had not caught anything during the trip filing off’ the boat.  Additional officers were called to help recover fish from the water, according to the spokeswoman.

“’After the dust cleared,’ Capt. Kelly wrote ‘there were over a dozen coolers left with no owners,’ which held more than 1,000 sea bass.  [emphasis added]”

The key takeaway here is that, if the enforcement officers had not intervened, the illegally-harvested black sea bass would not have appeared on the Fin Chaser’s VTR, and managers would have no way to know that they were taken.  Given the millions of pounds of black sea bass caught by anglers in the northeast every year, missing just an accounting for that one day wouldn’t have any significant impact on fishery management decisions.

Of course, that assumes that the Fin Chaser was caught the very first time that it landed illegal fish and provided an “incomplete” VTR.  That is certainly a possibility, although I leave it up to your judgment and experience to decide just how likely it is that such possibility reflects the truth…

And, unfortunately, the Fin Chaser isn’t alone when it comes to having a lot of illegal black sea bass on board.  In one highly publicized incident, which occurred back in 2012, the Brielle-based party boat Jamaica, a 125-foot vessel that operates all year long when weather permits, returned to the dock with 819 illegal (out-of-season) black sea bass on board.

Howard Bogan, the captain, does not deny what happened on the trip.  According to an article that originally appeared in the Asbury Park Press, which is no longer freely available online, but has been reproduced in its entirety in a post on the website stripersonline.com,

“[Capt. Bogan] did see fishermen keeping black sea bass, but said ‘I didn’t think it was that many.  And I’m not getting paid by the state of New Jersey to take fish out of people’s buckets.’

“He said no customers called to complain after drawing summonses.  They were made aware of the law, both before the trip and through warnings posted inside the boat, he said.”

There is no indication that law enforcement authorities found any problems with the Jamaica’s VTR that day, so without knowledge to the contrary, we have to assume that it was complete.  But still, one has to wonder.  If the captain knew that black sea bass were being kept, but “didn’t think that it was that many,” how likely was it that all 819 illegal fish would have made it onto his VTR had law enforcement not intervened? 

You can’t report fish if you don’t know they’re there.

Even though the stories of the Jamaica and the Fin Chaser are more than five years apart, and come from two different ports in two different states, we also have to wonder how many serious violations are out there that were just never detected, particularly in the black sea bass fishery.

Certainly, there are rumors.

I belong to a good-sized fishing club.  Because the folks there know that I am involved in fisheries issues, I hear a lot of complaints when they think that something illegal is going on, and want to get a message to law enforcement and regulators.

I’ve frequently heard complaints about the large fleet of party boats who dock at a nearby state park.  Folks tell me that when they fish close to them, either anchored up on a wreck some distance offshore, or drifting close by on a nearshore reef, they see a lot of clearly out-of-season and undersized fish—not only black sea bass, but scup, tautog, summer flounder and even a few cod—come up out of the water, but except for the short summer flounder, don’t see very many going back.

Others tell me about trips that their neighbors take—particularly evening and night trips for black sea bass—where the 15-inch minimum size and 3-fish summer bag limit is largely ignored.  One club member told me about an acquaintance taking home five or six times as many black sea bass as the law allowed, and when the club member expressed surprise over the angler being able to find so many 15-inch black sea bass on a single trip, the response was that the folks on the boat didn’t worry about the 15-inch limit, so long as all fish were cleaned on the boat before the angler left, making it impossible to prove that they had been undersized.

No, I don’t have personal knowledge of such violations, but the sheer volume of the stories I hear make it likely that a lot of illegal fish are being landed.

And it’s pretty likely that few, probably none, of those illegal fish are showing up on the boats’ VTRs.

That means that, under current conditions, the VTRs being filed—whether paper or electronic—just aren’t reliable enough to use for management purposes.  That’s unfortunate, because there are a lot of legitimate captains out there, particularly on the charter boat side, who would be glad to provide good information that might help to improve the management process.

Unfortunately, laws aren’t written to protect us from the honest folks, but to protect us from the other sort, who would violate the law with impunity in order to make a little more cash.  That being the case, if NMFS truly wants to use VTRs when compiling fisheries data, it needs to adopt policies—and primarily penalties—that would make filing intentionally or negligently inaccurate VTRs a serious offence.

Cash fines, no matter how steep, aren’t likely to get the job done, because the odds of being caught filing a bad VTR are high enough, and violators would be caught so infrequently, that the rewards from turning a blind eye to poachers onboard would make any such fine just a cost of doing business.

Permit sanctions might be a better answer.  If a boat’s permits to fish in both state and federal waters were suspended for a significant period of time during peak season—say, no less than 15 days for a first offense, and no less than 30 for a second-time offender, with permanent revocation a possibility if chronic violations occur—VTR data might become reliable enough for managers to rely on.

It would be nice to see that occur, because the honest for-hire operators shouldn’t have to suffer because of the folks who countenance illegality.  But until penalties stiff enough to deter violators are handed down and publicized, there is going to continue to be a problem with VTRs.

MAGNUSON-STEVENS "REFORM" IN A NUTSHELL

The reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act is beginning to gain some momentum.

On July 19, the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans held a hearing on the “Successes and Challenges” of Magnuson-Stevens.  I was invited to testify.

On August 23, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held its own  hearing in Soldotna, Alaska, which addressed Magnuson-Stevens, and plans to hold another in Washington, D.C. in a couple of days.

So it probably makes sense to stop and take a look at what’s going on.

Magnuson-Stevens is a comprehensive law, and a number of issues are going to be considered.  However, the heart of the debate revolves around the conservation and management of America’s salt water fish stocks, and the debaters break down into two basic camps. 

On one side, there are a host of conservation organizations and conservation-minded commercial and recreational fishermen, who want to keep the key provisions of the law, which include a strict prohibition on overfishing and require the prompt rebuilding of overfished stocks, intact. 

On the other side are an array recreational fishing tackle and boatbuilding groups, anglers’ rights organizations and some less-enlightened commercial fishermen, who are willing to tolerate overfishing and delay the rebuilding of overfished stocks, so that they can kill a few more fish and make a little more money in the short term, and worry about the future—at some point in the future, after they’ve sated their wants in the now.

 Granted, it doesn’t make a compelling case to say that you want to overfish a stock—or continue to hammer an overfished stock—so that you can make a few more bucks and pile a few more dead fish into the cooler.  

For some of the organizations involved, it’s also kind of embarrassing to be trying to weaken provisions of Magnuson-Stevens today, when they were fighting like demons to keep—or perhaps even strengthen—the same conservation-oriented language in the law when it was reauthorized a decade ago.

Thus, the folks trying to weaken Magnuson-Stevens, so that the law is more tolerant of overfishing and less insistent that overfished stocks be quickly rebuilt, have created a whole variety of weasel-words, and spawned a whole school of red herring, to mask the start reality of what they’re really trying to do.

So, as the debate heats up, it’s probably time to cut through the fog, see what each side is saying, and then figure out what it really means.

When you look at the pro-conservation, keep Magnuson-Stevens strong side of the equation, what you see is pretty much what you get.

One conservation group, the Ocean Conservancy, includes the following in its public outreach materials.

“From once plentiful cod and key species of rockfish to majestic sharks, species declined dramatically because we took too many fish out of the water and left too few behind to reproduce.  By the 1990s, many fisheries had collapsed or were on the brink.  Our country faced a massive dilemma:  change our behavior, or continue on the same path and face unprecedented consequences…

“Over the past four decades, we’ve made real progress toward overfishing in U.S. waters and rebuilding fish populations.  And we have a little-known law with a long name to thank:  The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA).

“Since 2007, the percentage of fish populations that are facing overfishing, or that are already overfished, has decreased—even as catches are increasing.  In 2015 alone, red snapper quotas were raised by more than 20 percent because the population is rebuilding, thanks to science-based management, better incentives for conservation and accountability for management.

“This points to positive recovery for our nation’s fisheries.  It’s clear that sound science and long term management are working for America’s fish stocks as well as our economy.

“Here at Ocean Conservancy, we’re committed to defending the integrity of the MSA so we can have healthy fish populations for generations to come.”

That’s pretty straightforward.  Magnuson-Stevens works.  It is ending overfishing, rebuilding overfished stocks and making more fish available to fishermen.  Thus, the conservation and management provisions of the law should not be torn apart.   

Although a few of the smaller details might differ, that’s essentially the same argument being made by all of Magnuson’s defenders.

It helps that what they’re saying is the unvarnished truth.  In 2000, 72 fish stocks were subject to overfishing, and 92 were overfished.  That number has fallen sharply.  Thanks to Magnuson-Stevens, today only 30 stocks are subject to overfishing, just 38 remain overfished and 41 once-overfished stocks have been fully rebuilt.

It’s hard to argue with that kind of success.

But if you want to be able to kill more fish than the law currently allows, you have to find a way.  That’s where the red herrings and the weasel-words come in.

They began to emerge in early 2014, when a group of fishing industry, anglers’ rights and boatbuilders groups issued a document titled “A Vision for Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational Fisheries,” under the aegis of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.  That “Vision” report was one of the first public airings of the notion that recreational fishing is so different from commercial fishing that key provisions of Magnuson-Stevens shouldn’t apply.

It alleged that

“Because it is a fundamentally different activity than commercial fishing, recreational fishing requires different management approaches…

“From a management perspective, the Magnuson-Stevens Act relies on limited entry and catch-share programs, along with fixed quotas that can be managed in real time.  While these approaches work for the commercial sector where relatively few vessels are focused on maximum sustainable yield, recreational fisheries are enjoyed by millions of individuals with diverse goals.  Some try to catch fish for food, while others simply want to have fun catching and releasing fish and enjoying their time outdoors.  What recreational anglers want and need is wide-ranging, dependable access to healthy and abundant fish stocks.

Like all the best efforts at misdirection, that quote contains just enough truth to lend it credibility, then takes the reader astray.  Because yes, there are a lot more recreational than commercial fishermen.  Yes, anglers have different goals.  And yes, anglers’ harvests can’t yet be managed in anything close to real time.

But the mention of catch-and-release anglers are a red herring, because catch-and-release, by its very nature, isn’t affected by “fixed quotas that can be managed in real time.”  Quotas only matter when you start killing fish and bringing them home.

The people that such quotas actually impact are those who “try to catch fish for food,” and in those fisheries, it’s much harder to argue that commercial and recreational fisheries have a fundamentally different impact on fish stocks.  While the landings of individual commercial and recreational fishermen vary in scale, they don’t differ at all with respect to the fact that both put dead fish on the dock. 

That fact was pointed out by Shannon Carroll, the deputy director of the Alaska Conservation Council, when he testified at the Senate Committee’s August 23 hearing.

“We may agree that they have different objectives, but the end result of both sectors is really the same—it’s the harvesting of a public resource.  I would encourage this committee to assure that sound science and individual accountability are the foundation of any new proposal.”

But individual accountability—making anglers responsible for the number of fish that they harvest—is just what the folks trying to weaken Magnuson-Stevens are trying to avoid.  Thus, the “Vision” report falls back on another old canard, that recreational fishing’s economic

“impact is equal to or greater than the commercial industry in terms of number of jobs provided and total economic benefits, while accounting for only a fraction of overall landings.  [emphasis added]”

Again, just enough truth to mislead…

Because yes, overall commercial landings dwarf overall recreational landings.  That’s true.  But what matters, in the context of recreational fishing, in the Magnuson-Stevens debate isn’t how many pounds of fish the commercial fishermen land over-all—let’s face it, anglers probably don’t care that nearly 3.3 billion pounds of walleye pollock were commercially landed in 2015—but how many pounds of recreationally-important fish are landed by the commercial sector.

When one looks at the relative commercial and recreational landings of fish that anglers actually care about, it becomes clear that we’re certainly killing our share.

A while ago, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council posted a blog titled “2016’s Most Wanted Fish,” which compared recreational and commercial landings for a number of federally-managed species.  It turns out that anglers in the Gulf were allocated just under half of the red snapper, and roughly 80% of the gray triggerfish, 75% of the greater amberjack, 65% of the king mackerel, 60% of the gag grouper and 55% of the Spanish mackerel.  Of the seven important species included in the blog, only one, red grouper, was dominated by the commercial fishery, which gets about 75% of the fish.

The trend is the same on other sections of coast.  Based on the commercial landings information provided by the National Marine Fisheries Service, as well as recreational landings estimates provided by the same agency for 2015, with respect to 20 Atlantic coast species, it becomes clear that recreational fishermen are responsible for a lot more than “a fraction” of the landings of many different fish. 

Anglers dominated the landings for wahoo (95%), red drum (95%), cobia (95%), dolphin (90%), mutton snapper (89%), tautog (89%), yellowtail snapper (86%), black drum (84%), spotted seatrout (83%), sheepshead (81%), striped bass (77%), black sea bass (74%), bluefish (74%)  and Florida pompano (70%).  Commercial fishermen, on the other hand, dominated the New England groundfish fishery, with 96% of the haddock landings, and 89% of both pollock and cod.  Commercial fishermen also landed a substantial majority of the scup (79%) and summer flounder (69%), and a slight majority of the weakfish (54%).

Thus, anglers don’t dominate every significant fishery, but they are responsible for most of the fishing mortality of many important stocks.  To argue that they shouldn’t be subject to annual catch limits—“fixed quotas”—as stated on more than one occasion in the “Vision” statement, is just not realistic given that unquestionable reality.

It’s just as unrealistic to suggest, as the “Vision” report does, that the anglers who seek to bring fish home aren’t concerned with maximum sustainable yield.  

According to The Fisherman magazine, when Commerce Secretary Ross stated that one of his goals was to obtain maximum sustainable yield from marine fisheries, Jim Donofrio, the Executive Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, an anglers’ rights group that makes common cause with the Coastal Conservation Association, another group with similar goals, and trade associations such as the American Sportfishing Association and National Marine Manufacturers Association, said

“that statement alone is a game changer.”             

                                              

It certainly seems that maximum sustainable yield mattered to him.  

And the Center for Sportfishing Policy, an umbrella organization that includes CCA, ASA and NMMA among its members, went out of its way to commend the Commerce Department for reopening the red snapper season in the Gulf of Mexico even though the agency admitted that such reopening would “necessarily” cause anglers to “substantially” exceed their annual catch limit.  So it seems that catching maximum sustainable yield—and even substantially more when they can—matters to those folks, too.

At heart, when it comes to killing fish, the recreational and commercial sectors aren’t really that different at all—at least not so different that anglers should be free of annual catch limits/hard-poundage quotas.

Even so, groups working with the Center for Sportfishing Policy support changing Magnuson-Stevens is a way that would exchange such quotas for

“alternative management for recreational fishing…smartly rebuilding fishery stocks, [and] establishing exemptions where annual catch limits don’t fit…”

In other words, to allow overfishing and delay rebuilding—because we can all be pretty sure that what the Center considers “smartly rebuilding” a stock would be more than a little different from how a biologist would interpret that term.

And just why are they so driven to make such changes?  

Comments made by Nick Cicero, a fishing tackle wholesaler from New Jersey, which were reported in The Fisherman provide some real insight into that.

“These amendments need to not only support the existing populations of recreational anglers and fishing related businesses but also to allow for new entrants to come into the fishery and businesses to grow and expand…

“The law needs to recognize that in its current form, our tradition of fishing cannot be passed on to our children without [Magnuson-Stevens] taking away opportunity from the rest of the fishing community.”

In other words, Magnuson-Stevens, with its annual catch limits and rebuilding deadlines, currently forces anglers to share.  

Right now, if new anglers—presumably but not necessarily children—come into the fishery, their catch comes out of a common quota.  It’s a zero sum game, with clear biological limits, and every fish someone catches is a fish that becomes unavailable to someone else.

And, based on Cicero's comments, it appears that the old guys just don’t want to share.  They would rather change a good law, and put the future health of our fish stocks at risk, because the only alternative to that is for the adults—chronological adults, at least—now in the fishery to give up some fish to their kids, and that’s something that they'd rather not do.

And that, in the end, is Magnsuon-Stevens “reform” in a nutshell.

When all of the fancy talk is done, it comes down to two groups of people. 

One wants a strong law, and healthy fish stocks that we can pass down to generations yet to be born.

The other, who want to weaken the law, already have quite a bit, want to have more, and do not want to share.

I leave it for you to decide who ought to win, and who should get your support. 

PETER PAN IS ALIVE--AND LIVING IN NEW JERSEY

You remember Peter Pan.  He was the  boy who wouldn't grow up, and remained a child for all eternity.

And such eternal childhood appears to have been a conscious choice.  In the original play where he was introduced to the world by author J.M Barrie, Peter Pan says

“I ran away the day I was born, because I heard father and mother talking about what I was to be when I became a man.  I don’t ever want to be a man.  I always want to be a little boy and to have fun.”

Essentially, Peter Pan’s escape from the real world into his sanctuary of Neverland was an escape from the need to don the mantle of responsibilities that come with adulthood.

Psychology recognizes the concept of the puer aeternus—the eternal boy.  Such an individual, among other things,

“covets independence and freedom, opposes boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.”

Recent news in the angling press suggests that Peter Pan—the puer aeternus—is still alive, and living in New Jersey’s recreational fishing community.

Some might say that is hardly a revelation; for years, recreational fishery management in the Garden State has been consistently characterized by efforts to resist limits and restrictions, and to kill the most and smallest fish possible over the longest period of time, without concern for the long-term health of fish stocks.  At the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, New Jersey’s representatives can be depended upon to try to harvest as many fish as possible, whether the species in question is striped bass or summer flounder.

This spring, the New Jersey angling community displayed its irresponsibility when it steadfastly refused to cooperate with the other members of ASMFC and adopt summer flounder regulations that were supported by the rest of the states with a declared interest in the fishery.  Instead, it went out of compliance with ASMFC’s summer flounder management plan, successfully appealing to the Secretary of Commerce, who allowed the state to keep its non-compliant regulations in place in a decision that seemed to be based primarily on politics, not science.

As Dennis Abbott, an ASMFC commissioner from New Hampshire, noted,

“If you can add up [New Jersey Governor] Christie, Trump and [Commerce Secretary] Ross and not come up with the fact that this was a political decision, you’ve got blinders on.”

But it wasn’t just the decision to ignore ASMFC and the advice of its biologists that evoked images of puer Peter Pan, as irresponsible as that decision might have been.  There is more to the story that is still developing.

That’s because, when New Jersey decided not to increase its summer flounder size limit from 18 to 19 inches, as ASMFC required, it argued that it was offsetting the impact of its smaller minimum size by shortening its summer flounder season from 128 to 104 days.  That season thus ended on September 5, the day after Labor Day.  That leaves New Jersey anglers with little to do, since the state’s black sea bass season closed on August 31, and won’t open again until the 22^nd of October.

Such enforced idleness shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.  On May 21, well before New Jersey’s summer flounder regulations were finally determined, The Fisherman magazine noted that

“it’s…the first time in 7 years that New Jersey has been limited to a Memorial Day to Labor Day season.  However, when the state was forced to cut the fluke season after Labor Day in 2010, New Jersey anglers were also allowed to fish for black sea bass in September.”

The article made it clear that such option would not be available this year.

Regardless of that fact, The Fisherman celebrated the Commerce Secretary’s decision to approve New Jersey’s noncompliant regulations, announcing it in a piece that was titled

“Who’s out of compliance now?”

The same article reported that

“While not every angler in New Jersey is happy with the loss of season in September, Jim Donofrio of the Recreational Fishing Alliance said that the decision by the Trump administration, notably Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, represents a big win for coastal fishermen.”

Based on such reactions, one might reasonably assume that the New Jersey angling community decided that it was worth trading a smaller summer flounder size limit for significantly reduced fishing opportunities during September, and accepted the fact that they would be sidelined for part of the fall.  That’s the sort of decision that a responsible adult might well have made.

But to believe that, one would have to forget that New Jersey remains the salt water angler’s Neverland, where everyone wants to have their irresponsible fun, and no one wants to grow up and assume a mature man’s (or woman’s) burdens.

Thus, it was probably predictable that a more recent article in The Fisherman, this one dated September 4, announced a meeting of New Jersey’s Marine Fisheries Council, and suggesting that anglers should show up and demand that the Council endorse opening a state-waters black sea bass season that would begin immediately and run through October 21.

Opening such a season would, for the second time this year, take New Jersey out of compliance with an ASMFC fishery management plan.  However, because of the time lags involved, it would be impossible to effectively sanction the state for such action.

And, besides, even if ASMFC did try to penalize the state for its failure to cooperate with everyone else, the Commerce Department’s summer flounder decision gives reason to believe that, if challenged, New Jersey would prevail once again.

Thus, The Fisherman wrote that

“In a press release sent out before the Labor Day weekend, the Recreational Fishing Alliance called the period between the [sic] September 6 and October 21 a regulatory ‘dead zone,’ while encouraging anglers to attend the Marine Fisheries Council meeting on Thursday and show support for the Council in taking action to open a limited fall fishery for black sea bass in state waters effective immediately.”

Apparently, the shortened fluke season wasn’t as much of a “big win” as RFA’s Donofrio originally announced.  Now, the organization is asking the state to go out of compliance again in order to correct a problem created when it went out of compliance in the first place—an action that Donofrio heralded at the time.

Does that sound like fully-mature adults taking responsibility for the consequences of the initial decision to go out of compliance?  Or like a gaggle of puer aeterni—a bunch of Peter Pans—who oppose “boundaries and limits, and…find any restriction intolerable,” and reflexively resist needed rules?

Such attitudes seem to have deep roots in the Garden State, where some anglers have just created a Facebook group called the “NJFFFR New Jersey Fishermen Fight for Fishermen’s Rights” (note the emphasis on “rights” without any mention of concomitant “responsibilities,” as the latter are strictly an adult’s concern).

Perusing the group’s Facebook page, I discovered a poster who said

“I’ve been a mate on a 4 hour party boat for the past 5 years in wildwood…Normally during the summer, I work 3 trips a day.  In the short span of time I’ve worked, even I can notice the alarming decrease in fish populations.  Some days, I’d fillet less than 10 legal fish the entire day.  Some days, we would fish for the doggies, the skates and the sea robins [all generally considered unwanted “trash fish”] just to give the tourists something to fish for.  It’s absolutely pathetic.  Beach replenishment killed our fishing, yet the government still wants to blame us, the little guys.  The government going after recreational fishermen is an absolute joke.  If the government had their way, nobody would be fishing.”

He sees, and acknowledges, a real problem with the health of fish stocks.  Yet he still denies any obligation to be a part of the solution, blaming government and refusing to admit that recreational fishermen have any responsibility for conserving the resource.

Peter Pan, indeed.

GIVE SHARKS A FAIR SHAKE

Like a lot of folks who grow up near the water, I’ve been fascinated by sharks for a very long time.

My first exposure to the clan was a “sand shark”—more properly, a smooth dogfish—that I caught from a rowboat sometime around my kindergarten year.  And yes, to me that was a very big deal.

But my real introduction came later, when I was thirteen, and went on my first “real deep-sea fishing trip” with my father and two of his friends.  We fished out of Galilee, Rhode Island on the Sea Squirrel, an old, slow party boat—someone once told me that it was a converted World War II sub chaser—that struggled to make 10 knots and took 2 ½ hours to get out to Cox’s Ledge.  But it was run by a captain who knew how to find cod when we eventually got there.

My father and I were fishing on the stern, and as soon as our baits hit the bottom, fish started grabbing on.  A fisherman a few feet away from me hooked a good fish that would probably have weighed at least 30 pounds.  But I can only speculate about that, because as the cod neared the boat, a big blue shark came out of nowhere and bit it in half.

The fishermen cursed, and cranked harder, hoping to salvage the few pounds of meat that the shark had left behind.  It looked like he would make it, but just as the cod’s truncated carcass broke the surface, the shark rolled up across the Sea Squirrel's stern, its back out of the water maybe three feet from my toes, took the cod in its jaws, broke the line and was gone.

It was the most spectacular exhibition of raw animal power I had seen in my young life, and proved a watershed.  At that moment, I promised myself that I’d become an offshore angler, and challenge the muscle and heart of such fish with my own.

And yes, I did those things, but not quite in the way I’d imagined.

I’ve been an active participant in the northeastern shark fishery for about forty years.  Over those years, I've either caught or helped others to catch many, many blue sharks, makos, tigers, threshers, sandbars, duskies and hammerheads (I may have left out a species or two).  

I was fishing maybe 30 miles south of Montauk, on a 20-foot boat, when a white shark about 15 feet long and perhaps 2,500 pounds—heavier than the combined weight of the boat, engine, gear and the people on board—cruised past almost near enough to touch.

That fish left me enraptured.

Because in becoming a shark fisherman, I discovered that I had become something else.  I became an enthusiast and a student of the big fish, which continue to fascinate me.  

I enjoy fishing for them, pitting myself against their strength and stamina.  But I don’t enjoy killing them, and seldom do.

On the first shark fishing trip that I ever made, paid for with the money I got from the first magazine article that I ever sold, I became a participant in the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Cooperative Shark Tagging Program, in which anglers tag and release sharks so that researchers can use data received, if the fish are recaptured, to study migration patterns, age, growth rates and fishing mortality, among other things.

Along the way, I’ve killed a few sharks—some in tournaments, others solely for the table—but never in excess and none went to waste.  Tournaments that leave sharks--even one--in a dumpster revolt me.  And even then, the last time my flying gaff pierced a shark’s skin was seventeen years ago.

Most of the anglers I know treat sharks with similar respect.  They may take a mako or thresher for the table every now and then, but they also let a lot of fish go.  Many now make a point of releasing their larger makos, believing that the big, mature females ought not to be killed.

And that’s a good thing.  Despite their role as an apex predator, sharks find themselves in a perilous place.  

Because they are large fish with few natural enemies once they grow large, they tend to be very slow to mature, reproduce slowly and, when populations are driven down, they are very slow to recover.  As an example, NMFS current management plan for dusky sharks predicts that the beleaguered population will take 100 years to rebuild—and that’s the agency’s most optimistic estimate; rebuilding could take four times that long.

Thus, it’s not surprising to learn that quite a few shark populations have become depleted, and that others are at risk. 

As someone who has been a shark fishermen since the 1970s, I’ve noticed a real decline in some species’ abundance.  Sandbar sharks, a close relative of the dusky, used to be very common off Long Island and southern New England.  Then, for a number of years, we caught very few.  Now, thanks to strict fishery management measures that prohibit harvest by anglers and all but a very few commercial fishermen, they seem to be coming back, and have been quite abundant in local waters this year.  Even so, the population isn’t expected to recover until about 2070—53 years from now.

Mako sharks also seem to be getting scarcer.  The Long Island mako season used to last from late May well into November, with a reasonable number of fish over 200 pounds caught even during the height of the summer.   But over the past 30 years, the season has grown shorter; most of the larger fish are caught in two short windows, from mid-June to mid-July, or from mid-September into mid-October.  Except out at Montauk, where boats have access to cooler water, fishing during the summer is very slow.

That’s not too surprising, because makos are arguably the most popular shark species, prized for both their value as food and as fighters; they are fast and, when hooked, often erupt into multiple, spinning leaps that take them high out of the water.  Thus, fishermen kill quite a few.  

The NMFS tagging program reports that shortfin makos—the species that we normally catch in the northeast—have the highest recapture/tag return rate of any shark studied—13.5%.

That suggests a worrisome rate of fishing mortality for a species that is so slow to mature—only 50% of females have reached reproductive maturity by the age of 18—and only produces one litter, which may number between 4 and 25 juveniles, every three years. 

Yet recent research suggests that the NMFS tag data may present an incomplete picture of shortfin mako mortality.  The real picture is probably far worse. 

Researchers in Florida and Rhode Island have been tagging the fish with satellite tags that automatically notify them when a mako is caught and killed, rather than the NMFS tags that must be mailed (or e-mailed) back to the agency to alert it of a recapture.  30% of the 40 fish tagged with such satellite tags have been recaptured, suggesting that a shortfin mako has only a 72% chance of surviving for even one year without being caught.  That would mean that the mortality rate is ten times higher than previously believed, and that the shortfin mako is subject to very severe, and clearly unsustainable, overfishing.

That needs to be fixed.  Unfortunately, because makos, like most highly migratory species, migrate across ocean basins and so are managed by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, there is no guarantee that any action will be taken soon.

The mako’s larger relative, the white shark, is also drawing the wrong kind of attention off New England these days.  

For the past few years, news outlets have frequently reported on how a return of large colonies of gray seals to the beaches of Cape Cod have attracted numbers of white sharks, which like to feed on the big pinnipeds. 

Recently, the sight of a shark killing a seal a short distance off a popular Cape Cod beach, and upsetting the people who saw it occur, has led a local Cape Cod politician to call for such fish to be killed.  In words reminiscent of the 1970s movie Jaws, Barnstable County Commissioner Ron Beatty has called for baited lines to be set off Cape Cod beaches, and for any sharks caught to be killed and dumped at sea.  

According to the Boston Herald, Beatty said that

“based upon the sharp increase in shark-related attacks and incidents around Cape Cod in recent years, there is a clear and present danger to human life as a result of this growing problem…

“This shark, that attack that got videotaped off Nauset, that was very close to shore and very easily could have been a small child and not a seal.  It’s very easy for those sharks to mistake a person for a seal.  They’re just looking for something to eat.  God forbid it’s somebody’s child, and by that time, it’s too late.  We can’t wait for that.”

But if anyone recalls the movie, attempts to kill the shark involved didn’t end very well, either for the shark or for many of the would-be shark hunters.

It would be better to leave the sharks alone, and just take the same sort of precautions campers and hikers have long taken out west, when they enter grizzly bear country.  Be situationally aware.  Give the big predators plenty of room.  And don’t act like—and, for would-be wetsuit wearers, don’t look like—their food.”

Yes, one day there will probably be a fatal shark attack on the Cape.  But that hasn’t happened yet, and when it does, the total number of tourists killed by sharks on Cape Cod in all of recorded history will still be far smaller than the number killed by drunks driving cars in the course of any single season.  So if the County Commissioner wants to save lives, sharks aren’t the place to start…

And then there are the other sharks, the ones that often don’t get the headlines, but are nonetheless having problems and don’t need any more.  NMFS maintains a whole list of them, and calls them “prohibited species.”  The white, dusky and sandbar, already mentioned, are on that list, along with the sand tiger and bignose and silky and a few more.

One of the problems they’re having, up here in the northeast, is the resurgent popularity of shark fishing from the surf.

There’s no question that it’s a challenging sport, and that a shark is the biggest thing a surfcaster here on Long Island is ever going to have on his line.   There’s also little question that, in this part of the world, when anyone shark fishes from the beach, prohibited species are just about all that they’re going to catch.  Sandbars and sand tigers will comprise almost all of the catch.

That’s a problem, because while sharks are relatively easy to hook from the beach, they’re not easy to let go.  That leads to the fish being dragged up out of the water and onto the beach, often by their tails, which were never designed—particularly given the fact that the shark’s spine is not made of bone, but rather of soft cartilage—for that purpose, just as a shark’s internal organs were never designed to support the weight of such fish when out of the water.  Thus, it is easy for even the best-intentioned angler to fatally injure a fish in the course of trying to release it.

Add to those stresses the fact that many anglers can’t find it in themselves to let a shark go without first taking a series of photos, which leaves the fish out of the water longer than necessary, depriving it of the oxygen that it can only extract from the sea.  Handling during the photos is also far from gentle, with fishermen often wanting photos showing themselves sitting astride their conquered quarry.  Some idiots take that a step farther, grab the shark by the nose and bend their heads backward in ways that threaten the spine, in order to show off the fact that the fish has teeth—something that most of us already know.

Such handling can easily lead to delayed mortality, where the fish swims away, apparently healthy, and later succumbs to its injuries and dies unseen and unlamented by its erstwhile captor.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation warns anglers against such harmful actions, advising

“If you catch a prohibited shark species while fishing from shore, please do not drag the shark onto the beach.  If you hook a prohibited shark species you must return the shark to the water at once, without unnecessary injury to the shark.  The easiest way to do this is to cut your leader as closely to the hook (as safely as practicable), while the shark is still in the water.”

Delaware has gone even further, and has adopted a regulation stating that

“It is unlawful for any hook and line fisherman to remove from the water sandbar shark, or any other species of shark when prohibited from harvest…”

That’s a good rule.  But in New York, and probably other states, anglers dragging prohibited sharks onto the sand could still find themselves in trouble.  As noted in a recent article on the website 27East, which focuses on eastern Long Island,

“The federal laws protecting them also makes it illegal to target those species of shark—which Mr. Metzger [a biologist interviewed for the article] and other shark scientists say anyone fishing for sharks from the beach is doing, since they are generally the only species that come into the surf zone regularly…

“Picking up the sharks or sitting on their backs, holding their mouths agape, for photos, which Mr. Metzger says he sees examples of frequently in social media, is an offense that can be prosecuted.

“A spokesperson for the State Department of Environmental Conservation said that publicly shared photos can be grounds for issuing a summons for a violation…

”Mr. Metzger…says he understands the thrill that shore anglers are seeking but believes that they should put concern for the sharks ahead of entertainment.

“[P]ulling a shark up onto the sand, even if only to remove a hook, compounded with the stress of the fight, can be fatal for the shark, even an hour after it is released seemingly healthy.

“’You are potentially killing a protected species for a photo,’ he said.  “’Come on.’”

That pretty much says it all.