A ZERO-SUM GAME

It doesn’t matter what species we’re talking about, or what fisheries are involved.  Once all of the available fish are fully utilized, and landings approach optimum yield, fishery management becomes a zero-sum game. 

In order to give more fish to one sector, managers have to take fish away from someone else. 

There’s just no getting around it, because if you let someone take more, and don’t cut back elsewhere, overfishing will result.  Let that happen, and everyone will end up with less whatever the allocations may be.

I was reminded of that last week, after New York’s fishery managers set up a public meeting to discuss this year’s recreational black sea bass rules.

For those not familiar with the black sea bass fishery, it’s one of those  confounding situations where what should have been a great success story—black sea bass abundance is close to twice the target level, and fish have become available to anglers in numbers and places that are unique in the memory of most fishermen now alive—is turning into something that looks like disaster, as various factors converge to complicate the management process.

A warming ocean has helped to create the issue, in a number of ways.  The size of a black sea bass year class is largely dependent on the conditions it encounters during its first winter at the edge of the continental shelf.  Warm, saline water is conducive to the young sea bass’ survival, so when the winter of 2011-2012 produced unusually high winter water temperatures, the black sea bass responded; the 2011 year class produced off-the-charts abundance, and fish began showing up everywhere.

At the same time, beginning in 2010, summer flounder reproduction went into a tailspin, and hasn’t yet recovered.  That meant that around 2014, when the 2011 black sea bass year class were entering the northeastern fishery in big numbers, fewer legal summer flounder were available to anglers. 

As anglers tend to target whatever is most available, summer angling effort began to shift from summer flounder onto sea bass.  Here on the South Shore of New York’s Long Island, a lot of that shift manifested itself not in what anglers were supposedly fishing for, but instead, in where they were fishing.  Effort shifted from the bays, inlets and sand humps offshore to hard structure such as wrecks and artificial reefs, places where they knew they could, at least, put a few black sea bass in the cooler if the summer flounder didn’t show.

As a result, anglers started catching a lot of black sea bass, and because the stock was healthy, a lot of those sea bass were pretty big.  In 2006, for example, anglers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic landed about 1.3 million black sea bass, and the average fish weighed about 1.4 pounds; ten years later, in 2016, landings had increased to 2.5 million fish, with an average weight of 2 pounds.  With those sort of numbers, anglers could land their annual catch limit quickly, even as that catch limit increased in response to the abundance of fish.

At the same time, the warming oceans were seeing the center of black sea bass abundance shift north.

For many years, recreational black sea bass landings were dominated by the states between New Jersey and Virginia, with far fewer fish caught in the north.  Prior to 2003, when black sea bass were still badly overfished, those states accounted for more than 80% of black sea bass landings, with states between New York and Massachusetts accounting for the rest.  But the southern share began to decline in 2004; in 2009, for the first time, northern states accounted for a majority of the landings.  By 2016, the situation was entirely inverted, with 83% of the recreational sea bass landings generated by states between Massachusetts and New York.

Unfortunately, regulations hadn’t kept up with the trends in abundance.  They kept bag limits high and size limits low in the southern states, where the fish used to be, and were seldom caught any more (Virginia anglers, for example, landed about 450,000 black sea bass in 2000, and just 29,000—about 6.5% of 2000 landings—in 2016), and forced northern states, where the fish were present in far larger numbers, to adopt ever-larger size limits and ever-shrinking bags in a fruitless effort to constrain their harvest (landings in New York tripled, from 335,000 to over 1,000,000 million fish, during the same period).

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission tried to address that problem in 2018, grouping the states into regions that might better reflect the origins of the fish that they catch (the latest benchmark stock assessment, released late in 2016, broke the population into northern and southern components, with Hudson Canyon, located off New York and New Jersey, and the demarcation between the two).

However, things haven’t changed much since the late blues artist Billie Holliday co-wrote and sang God Bless the Child back in 1939:

“Them that’s got shall have

Them that’s not shall lose…

“…Rich relations give

Crust of bread and such

You can help yourself                             

But don’t take too much…

That became clear when ASMFC’s Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Management Board met in February, to finalize the regions and allocate recreational black sea bass landings for 2018.

They had a few choices to make.  They could have established two regions, which would have grouped New Jersey, which shares many fishing grounds with New York, with the four northern states, and required it to have similar size and bag limits.  However, because New Jersey straddles Hudson Canyon, that didn’t happen; ASMFC established a northern region that only includes the states between New York and Massachusetts, which will share the northern component of the population, based on their historical landings.

And ASMFC had to decide which historical landings to use.  A five-year time period, encompassing landings between 2011 and 2015, provided the “cleanest” data and would have fully captured the northern movement of the stock.  But here’s where Billie Holiday, the “crust of bread” and injunction “don’t take too much” comes in.

Because, as I mentioned at the start of this piece, fishery management is a zero-sum game, and the southern states, who were definitely in the “them that’s got category,” didn’t want to base the allocations on recent landings, which would give northern states—“them  that’s not”—more than a “crust of bread” out of the southern state’s larder.  Instead, they favored a 10-year period that also included seasons when the south dominated the fishery, even though the fish weren’t off their shores in such abundance these days.

In the end, the states compromised on an allocation that amounted to an average between what each region would get under each of the two allocations.  I call that a “compromise,” but it was the kind of compromise that someone makes when a bayonet is just starting to pierce that soft triangle of flesh at the base of his throat.  As one northern state rep noted at the meeting, “It’s 6 to 4,” favoring the south, and it was clear how things had to end.

So, in contrast to the southern states “that’s got” both the allocation and the votes, the northern states “that’s not” did lose, having to collectively surrender about 100,000 black sea bass that their anglers would have been able to land if allocations were based on the more recent five-year period.

The northern states all voted against ASMFC’s bastard averaging approach, and they did in fact lose, by the predicted 6-4 margin.  They will bring a formal appeal at ASMFC’s May meeting, but their chances of success are not overwhelming.

So all of the states are going to have to set black sea bass regulations that look something like a 15-inch minimum size, 4-fish bag limit and a season that runs from mid-June through mid-October.

Which brings us back, the long way, to New York’s public meeting and the zero-sum game.

Although all of the northern states are required to adopt similar regulations, the rules don’t need to be exactly the same.  They merely have to have “conservation equivalency” to the model set of rules meaning that a state may not adopt regulations that would result in a larger harvest than the model rules would.  Still, state discretion isn’t unlimited; the size limit must be within one inch of the model, and the bag limit can’t vary by more than three; there is unlimited discretion on the season, so long as it won’t allow too many fish to be caught.

New York decided that it would keep the 15-inch minimum size, but proposed keeping its current 3-fish bag limit during July and August, when private-boat anglers typically dominate the catch, and allow anglers to keep 5 black sea bass (down from 8 in September and October and 10 in November and December) through the rest of the year.  That would allow New York anglers the longest possible season, beginning it on July 1, while retaining the September through December fishery that’s important to the for-hire fleet.

No, the proposal isn’t perfect, but it’s a reasonable compromise that provides at least some sort of directed summer fishery, while giving the for-hires and the more serious private-boat anglers a chance to catch black sea bass when waters cool in the fall.

But a bunch of the for-hires aren’t happy with that.  They’re demanding that the proposal be changed to give them more fish in the fall.  They claim that they “need” those fish for their business.

The problem is, there is only one place they can get those fish from, and that’s to take them away from the private boat fleet.  Because it is, in the end, a zero-sum game, and New York’s anglers are only allocated a limited number of fish.  For the for-hire boats to get more, the private boats must get fewer.  There is no other way.

And New York’s private boat anglers are already losers in their own right when it comes to black sea bass.

At the March 2016 meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, the Council was given a number of possible black sea bass regulations, and asked to vote for their preferred alternative.  The choice ultimately came down to two proposals, which were identical in all respects, except that one alternative would open the season on June 27, and reduce the bag limit from 8 fish to 3 from then until vthe bag limit from 8 fish to 5 during July and August.

Representatives of the party boat fleet present at the meeting were split, with those from eastern Long Island preferring the later opening, while those from the rest of New York insisting on the earlier season, despite the sharp reduction in bag limit.  The Marine Resources Advisory Council, on a close vote, preferred the later start and 5-fish bag; however, their advice was rejected by the Department of Environmental Conservation, which opted for the earlier start.

So the party boats on western and central Long Island got their 11 extra days of season, but effectively paid for it by taking fish out of the coolers of the private boat fleet, which normally dominates black sea bass landings before Labor Day. 

It is, after all, a zero-sum game.

As a private-boat angler who is active in the black sea bass fishery—and used to be a lot more active, when the bag limit was large enough to have a directed fishery in the summer, before a lot of the wrecks and other structure was picked over by the party boat fleet—I wasn’t happy about that decision, but the folks manning the agency are paid to use their best discretion, and on the whole, they do a fine job, even if all of us can second-guess one of their calls every now and again.

But now, that early start apparently isn’t important to the western party boat fleet any more, because they’re demanding more fish in the fall.  Once again, managers are playing a zero-sum game, so the only way that the west end boats are going to get those fish is to delay the start of the season and take fish away from the private boat fleet once again, and in doing so also take them away from their own early-season customers, who apparently don’t “need” fish at that time of year any more.  (Of course, given the compliance—or lackthereof—with the rules on some of the boats, maybe they just figure that changing the early rules won’t impact customers all that much).

Hopefully, the state will stick to its guns, and implement the regulations that it originally proposed for 2018.

If the western party boats get their way, and are again allowed to snatch fish from the private boat fleet, something is very, very wrong.

Fisheries management might be a zero-sum game.  But that doesn’t mean that the state should make the private boat anglers pay, again, for the party boats' hunger.  

There is more than enough pain for us all to share.

FISHERIES MANAGEMENT; CRACKING THE FACADE

The current effort to weaken the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act is built on a number of…well, to be polite, let’s call them “myths.”  Perhaps the greatest of those is that the entire angling community is on the same side.

It makes for a good story, and has probably convinced a legislator or two to support a bill that wouldn’t have otherwise gotten the nod, and convinced a few more anglers to jump onto a bandwagon that they would have otherwise ignored.

The story’s a lot more attractive than the unvarnished truth, that the bill is largely the creation of a fishing-tackle trade group seeking to boost its members’ incomes, boatbuilders with similar goals, and a handful of anglers’ rights groups—the biggest of them having, by its own count, a little over 100,000 members (a very small piece of the estimated 8,300,000 saltwater fishermen in the United States)—who want to put a few more fish in their coolers, and leave a few less in the sea.

But slowly, the real story is trickling out.

This week the Center for American Progress, a Washington “think tank,” put a big, ugly crack in the industry/anglers’ rights crowd’s pretty façade when they issued a study titled “The Rise of the Recreational Fishing Lobby." 

The study’s findings won’t be any surprise to folks who regularly read this blog, but the fact that a respected Washington think tank thoroughly investigated the issue, and came to the same conclusions, is significant. 

People who matter are beginning to look behind the curtain, and are clearing away the smoke and mirrors generated by the critics of Magnuson-Stevens who are behind the so-called Modern Fish Act and similar bills.

The authors of the study caught the key issue in a single paragraph, when they observed that

“In the past, outdoor recreation advocates have measured the success of their policy advocacy by fishery abundance, focusing on keeping their resource plentiful.  However, in recent years, some recreational equipment manufacturers have joined forces with the majority of recreational fishing organizations to support changes to the law that would provide greater recreational access to fisheries while weakening science-based safeguards that promote the health and abundance of fish stocks.  This emphasis on access at the expense of abundance reflects the business model of the equipment industry:  Selling more boats, tackle, and gear requires perpetual growth in the number of fishing participants not just the size of fish populations.  [emphasis added]”

Undoubtedly, that statement is going to draw some outraged shrieks from the anglers’ rights crowd.  

It’s likely that the same sort of folks who howl at the moon about losing “the days of freedom in our fisheries,” or who spout trite complaints about federal fisheries managers’ “harmful overregulation,” and “burdensome restrictions” will eventually claim that the report only reflects the pro-regulation bias of the progressive think tank that produced it.

Such specious arguments are destined to fail.  Not only is “The Rise of the Recreational Fishing Lobby” well-researched, but it’s core message, quoted above, merely reflects statements made by Modern Fish Act supporters.

Last summer, they held what they called their “Weigh-in on the Hill,” where they met, discussed the Modern Fish Act and tried to attract congressional support.  One of the speakers at that event was New Jersey tackle wholesaler Nick Cicero, of Bimini Bay Outfitters and the Folsom Corporation.  According to The Fisherman magazine, Cicero told the assembled crowd that

“These amendments need to not only support the existing population of recreational anglers and fishing related businesses but also allow new entrants to come into the fishery and businesses to grow and expand.  The law needs to recognize that in itsMagnuson-Stevens Act] taking away opportunity from the rest of the fishing community.  [The Magnuson-Stevens Act], as it applies to recreational fishing, is a flawed law, one that stifles growth of our industry and challenges the very future of our tradition.  [emphasis added]”

His statement completely corroborates the thesis of the report, and the rest of the report seems equally true.

Anglers and everyone else concerned with the health of our fisheries should also think long and hard about a very important question posed by the report:

“If the prioritization of fish abundance is now being superseded by the pursuit of opportunity to fish, precisely what is it that recreational advocates are fighting to access?”

It’s an important question, because as just about any angler can tell you, abundance matters.  Fishing for spooky, selective, hard-to-fool fish is a challenge; even when you can’t catch one, you can have a good, if frustrating, day.

But it’s important to know that the fish are there.  It’s tough to get excited about fishing in a largely empty sea, when you know that you can do everything right, and still come up empty, solely because the fish aren’t there.  I lived through that forty years ago, when the striped bass collapsed.

But those were striped bass and I was still almost young, not yet married and stubborn enough to think that hunting unicorns might be fun.  I was willing to make thousands of casts in an effort to find the handful of fish that swam along miles of otherwise empty shore.

But I was largely alone.  Unicorns were not for everyone.  A lot of folks chose to stay home.

The important thing to remeber, though, is that just before the collapse, people caught a lot of striped bass.  The stock didn’t collapse all at once.  The spawning failures began in 1975, but big fish were abundant throughout most of the 1970s.  I worked in a tackle shop for much of that decade, and for a few years, saw customers bring a parade of large stripers—the sort of big females that were critically important to the future of the stock—through the door, to get their photos taken and hang their bass on the scale.  Sometimes, they’d hang three or four at a time.

Yet, although it was clear that the bass was in trouble, and that a serious reckoning was on the horizon if nothing was done, the owner of the shop where I worked thought things were just fine.  He didn’t support conservation efforts, and grew angry any time that I raised the topic.  All he cared about was the short term.

That, I think, provides an answer to the puzzle of “What is it that recreational advocates are trying to access?”

Remember that fish stocks don’t collapse all at once.

If Magnuson-Stevens were weakened, and anglers were allowed to overfish, businesses would, at first, see a boom.  

Red snapper, summer flounder, black sea bass and other fish that have been at the heart of the Modern Fish Act debate are essentially meat fish; they might be fun to catch, but fishermen catch them for meat, not for sport. 

If bag limits were higher, seasons longer and size limits smaller, anglers would undoubtedly respond, fishing more often to fill up their freezers, so long as the fish were available.  They would buy boats and tackle, and the industry would thrive—while the boom lasted.

Then stocks would decline, and everyone would suffer, but that wouldn’t happen all at once, either, and fishing would continue while stocks declined. 

We saw that with winter flounder in the northeast.  Up through the early 1980s, anglers who fished in the best spots during the peak season could literally catch them by the bushel.  

In New York, recreational fishermen took home more than 7,000,000 of them in 1984.  After that, things went downhill pretty quickly, falling by 95 percent—to 330,000 fish—by 1994.  Yet the tackle shops and the party boats still opposed harvest restrictions, arguing that anglers needed the “perception” that they could have a “big day” and take home, if not a bushel, at least a pailful of fish, even if that almost never happened.

By 2014, landings had dropped to just 24,000 fish—one-third of one percent (0.3%) of what they were thirty years before—but the representatives of the recreational fishing industry were fighting hard to significantly lengthen the season, seeking whatever short-term benefits that might provide, instead of trying to rebuild the stock.

To use the language of the Center for American Progress report, they were still emphasizing “access over abundance,” even though the stock had collapsed and local extirpation was a real threat.

And that probably explains the current debate over the Modern Fish Act and Magnuson-Stevens.  

American businesses are notorious for their focus on the short term,

“As a result, they’re not investing in their workers, in research, or in technology—short-term costs that would reduce profits temporarily.”

Given that fact, it’s hardly surprising that many fishing tackle and boatbuilding businesses don’t support conservation and the abundance it brings, which in the end is essentially an investment in our fisheries’ future.  Instead, because conservation has short-term costs, such businesses are investing their efforts in access, seeking the short-term profits such access may bring.

Such thinking probably isn’t in the long-term interest of the businesses, and it certainly isn’t in the long-term interest of our fish stocks.

American anglers need to take some of the findings in the Center for American Progress report to heart, because the long-term health of fish stocks is critically linked to the long-term health of American angling.

So, as the Modern Fish Act supporters fight to increase what they call “access” at the expense of abundance, and threaten the future of our fish stocks, I will leave you with a final thought, and one final question, gleaned from the late Leonard Cohen’s “Stories of the Street.”

“I know you’ve heard it’s over now and war must surely come,

the cities they are broke in half and the middlemen are gone.

But let me ask you one more time, O children of the dusk,

all these hunters who are shrieking now oh do they speak for us?”

If you believe in abundant fish stocks, when it comes  to the Modern Fish Act folks, the answer is clearly no.  That's something that our federal legislators need to understand.

RUNNING ON EMPTY

The sun is rising ever higher in the sky.  On Tuesday, for he first time in six months, days will be longer than nights.

Just off the coast, life is stirring.

Shoals of small, silver fish, back from a year spent offshore, are making their way toward small creeks and big rivers, on their way to rivers where their kind have spawned since the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier.

The fish are “river herring,” a catch-all term that includes both the alewife and the very similar blueback herring, and there are a lot fewer of them than there used to be.

When I was growing up in the ‘60s, on the southwest corner of the Connecticut coast, river herring began to crowd into local rivers toward the end of March, and stayed through the middle of May.  

In the Mianus River, close to my home, they flooded in at high tide, circling at the base of the dam that blocked their transit upstream.  Even when the tide was dead low, and the riverbed was nothing but stones washed by inch-deeps trickles of water, herring turned on their sides and drove themselves over the rocks and the gravel to the deeper pool cut by water pouring over the dam.

It was a spectacle, that we often stopped by just to watch.  

And it supported a unique fishery that saw men come to the river with long-handled nets and, much like herons, perch on the rock- and concrete-lined bank hoping to fill bushel baskets with herring, which they took home and pickled.

But at some point between then and now, that run just died.  

A trickle of fish still came into the river, but the big run, the spectacle, and the fishery were gone.  The dam cut off access to the upstream spawning grounds; bycatch in offshore fisheries for Atlantic herring (which, unlike river herring, spend their entire lives in the ocean) and Atlantic mackerel depleted the fish while at sea.

River herring runs along the entire Atlantic coast met the same fate.  Streams that once “ran silver” with fish were empty at life—not only of herring, but of the striped bass, ospreys and other predators that followed the run. 

A few runs remained relatively healthy, and others, including the one on the Mianus River, were partially restored after fish ladders, that allowed herring to get over the dam, were put in.  But most river herring runs declined sharply, and some disappeared as the river herring population fell to just 3% of historic levels.

Things got so bad that the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a petition in 2011, seeking to have both species listed under the Endangered Species Act; despite the decline in river herring abundance, federal fishery managers decided that such a listing was not warranted in 2013.

However, actions are still being taken to rebuild herring runs.  

Here on Long Island, the Seatuck Environmental Association and its partners have initiated what they call the “Long Island River Revival Project,” which seeks to restore river herring runs as an important step toward restoring the overall healthy of coastal waterways. 

I help out Seatuck by monitoring local rivers for signs of returning herring.  A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing what might have been the first alewife to run the Carlls River, in Babylon, NY, in more than a century.  

Over the years, I’ve caught far, far bigger fish that didn’t give me a tenth of the thrill.

That first herring didn’t make it; it seemed to have fallen from a newly-built fish ladder, and was close to death on a gravel bar when I saw it.  But the mere fact that the fish was there held promise, and a camera built into the fish ladder later caught a number of herring successfully swimming past the dam and into the lake above.

In other states, there have been similar efforts to rebuild the runs, and some have been effective.  

In Maine, dam removal has led to a 3,000,000-fish run in the Sebasticook River, a run strong enough to allow the riverfront town of Benton to hold an annual Alewife Festival, which brings revenue into the town; the town is also spending some money to restore river herring to a tributary of the big river, hoping that

“a million more spawning alewives in the Sebasticook River may enhance our income in future years.”

That’s a worthwhile hope.

At the federal level, some actions have also been taken to help out the herring.  

Although efforts to make river herring a “stock in the fishery” governed by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s mackerel, squid and butterfish management plan failed a few years ago and, as a result, there is no federal fishery management plan covering the two species, the Mid-Atlantic Council did decide to impose river herring annual catch caps on the Atlantic mackerel fishery.

“The cap starts at 89 [metric tons] but increases to 155 [metric tons] if mackerel catches surpass 10,000 [metric tons] and river herring and catches [sic] up to that point have stayed below 89 [metric tons].  Catch of river herring and shad on fishing trips that land greater than 20,000 lb of mackerel count toward the cap.  If [the National Marine Fisheries Service] determines that 95 percent of the river herring and shad cap has been harvested, a 20,000-lb mackerel possession limit will become effective for the remainder of the fishing year.”

The New England Fishery Management Council has also taken measures to protect river herring from incidental harvest/bycatch in the Atlantic herring fishery.  Pursuant to rules initially adopted by NMFS,

“Catches of river herring and shad on fishing trips that land more than 6,000 lb of herring count toward the caps.  Caps are area and gear specific.  If NMFS determines that 95 percent of a river herring and shad cap has been harvested, a 2,000-lb herring possession limit for that area and gear will become effective for the remainder of the fishing year.”

Although far from a perfect solution to the incidental catch/bycatch problem, the caps represent a step forward.  

From the time that its cap was first imposed in 2014, through all of 2017, the Atlantic mackerel fishery has never even reached 50% its maximum catch.  Things haven’t gone quite as smoothly in the Atlantic herring fishery, as the Southern New England Bottom Trawl gear category did catch about 113% of its quota in 2015, but even with that overage, the Atlantic herring fishery did not exceed its overall catch cap in 2015 or in any other year through 2017.

Unfortunately, things seem to be changing for the worse this year; river herring appear to be suddenly vulnerable to the big mid-water trawls. 

On February 23, NMFS announced that the Atlantic mackerel fishery had already exceeded its catch cap and that, as result, possession of more than 20,000 pounds of mackerel would be prohibited, beginning on February 27, for the rest of the year.

That announcement was quickly followed by another on March 12.  This time, NMFS revealed that the Southern New England Mid-Water Trawl Category of the Atlantic herring fishery had exceeded its catch cap, and that effective March 14, boats in that category could not possess more than 2,000 pounds of Atlantic herring.

Those two announcements do not bode well for river herring.  Although the catch caps will hopefully prevent further destruction of the river herring stocks, the 110 metric tons of river herring caught in the mackerel fishery during the first two months of 2018 amount to almost twice the river herring caught in that fishery through all of the proceeding four years.  

And it’s a pretty good bet that the big mid-water trawlers will be trying to find ways around the current possession limits.  

It’s not clear why so many river herring have been incidentally killed so quickly this season.

Maybe they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or maybe the mid-water trawlers, aware that they didn’t come close to landing their caps in past years, have become more aggressive, willing to sacrifice more river herring in order to land more of their Atlantic herring and mackerel quotas.

But given the low numbers of river herring that returned to their spawning streams last season, it’s pretty certain that this year’s large incidental catches of river herring aren’t due to an increase in their numbers.

So as I get ready to begin my river herring monitoring efforts for another season, I have to question whether the measures currently in place are enough to stabilize, much less rebuild, dwindling runs of alewives and bluebacks.

And I have to wonder whether the streams that I watch will 

run just a little silver once again.

Or if they’ll keep running on empty, as they already have for far too long.

IN MEMORIAM, ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY

This isn’t the blog that I was planning to write today.

But as I started to put together the data that I needed to write what I had originally intended, I came across some other numbers that made me stop in my tracks, particularly because Saturday is St. Patrick’s Day.

To many of those reading this, that may make Saturday a day for parades, corned beef and beer.  But once, for many of us, St. Patrick's Day would have been the unofficial start of the winter flounder season.  

If early March had been kind, and gave us a few days to get our boats painted and into the water, we fished from them, trying to hide from the wind in a sheltered place, where the dark mud bottom would trap the heat of the sun and spur the flounders to feed.  Lacking our own boats, we’d rent a skiff or jump on a party boat, or maybe just fish from a dock or a local shore, where we expected some fish to be waiting.

Over the course of the year, we caught a lot of flounder.  

Anglers in the northeast took home an estimated 13,685,628 of them in 1981, and that number stayed fairly steady through 1985, when an estimated 16,306,302 winter flounder were landed.

Those are impressive numbers.  They turned out to be too impressive to be sustainable. 

Over the past five years, recreational winter flounder landings were estimated to fall in a range between 50,603 and 133,426 fish—less than 1% of what we were landing in the early 1980s.  And even those dismal numbers don’t tell the whole story, because these days, between 80% and 90% of the landings are coming from a small area around Boston, Massachusetts, with almost nothing being taken anywhere else.  

Here in New York, for example, anglers landed 7,384,229 winter flounder in 1984, compared to a whopping 492 last season.

So my boat is still resting under its winter cover, and on Saturday, I’ll be staying indoors, dry and warm, at the Long Island Fly Fishing Expo, listening to people talk about fish, instead of getting cold and windburned out on Great South Bay, and actually catching them.

But I’d rather be out in the cold.  My world’s a little smaller with the winter flounder gone, and they’re not likely to fill it again.

And winter flounder aren’t all we have lost.

As I perused the data, I noted that that we used to catch a lot of cod in the '80s, too—between about 1,400,000 and 4,400,000 per year, compared to 30,000 to 390,000 per year since 2013. 

Cod are another one of those fish that I feel special ties to, and miss quite a bit.  They played a part in family vacations since I was six years old, when all of us started trundling onto party boats up in New England seeking them and other groundfish. 

Those were the days when I saw my first whales and first knew the excitement that comes from dropping a line into unknown waters, where who-knew-what swam.  As I grew into my early teens, I began codfishing with my father and his friends, then with him alone, on trips that burn bright in my memory as I reflect on times and people that have both passed on.

And when I remember those things, the loss of the cod hurts badly, too.

And then there are pollock.

If flounder marked the start of my angling voyage and, for many years, the start of each new season, and if cod were my introduction to the ocean and, through fishing, to the adult world, pollock marked the start of the sort of adventures that would mark most the rest of my years, when I ran small boats over long distances, sometimes to unknown waters, just to find a good bunch of fish.

For those who don’t live in the northeast, and aren’t familiar with pollock, think of them as sort of like cod, version 2.0.  

While cod are a tasty, slow-moving groundfish, perfectly willing to suck crabs off the bottom if the herring play hard-to-get, pollock are a stronger, sleeker animal, willing and able to chase food in the mid-waters and sometimes—though not too often—right to the surface as well.  And they still taste good.  Maybe not as good as cod, but still good enough to make the chase worthwhile.

Back in 1981, pollock still ran strong in the spring off Block Island, Rhode Island, so a few of us convinced ourselves to run a smallish outboard boat the 100 or so miles from its dock in Cos Cob, in western Connecticut, to the Block Island pollock grounds. 

The trip involved a night-long transit in pea-soup fog, followed by a too-close encounter with a surfacing whale, and involved a leaking boat that we feared, for a while, might sink from beneath us.  It was capped off by a long trip home in the face of a stiff west wind and a steep, pounding chop that made us all happy when, hours later, finally returned home. 

I loved every minute over it, including the fact that a very small portion of the 1,400,000 pollock caught by anglers that year came home with us.  Inspired by that success, I've spent most of four decades running small boats out beyond the horizon, in search of fish and less tangible things.  And I have. many times, reaped the rewards.

But the pollock, too, are a thing of the past, with 2017 recreational landings only about 17% of what they were in 1981.  While that’s not as bad as the decline in winter flounder or cod, the fish have all but abandoned southern New England, and Block Island’s spring run ended long ago.

Yet some of us can still remember, and mourn the loss.

I offer these tales as a warning. 

Don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

We didn’t have to lose the flounder, the cod or the Block Island pollock run.  There was plenty of time to avoid it, if the people in charge of such things had the political will.

The National Marine Fisheries Service released a stock assessment in 1986 which warned that

“The general conclusion…was that the abundance of winter flounder in all stocks has declined and may be near historically low levels.  This is supported by data from a variety of data sources collected by both federal and state agencies.”

With respect to cod, the assessment found that

“Survey indices, commercial [catch per unit effort], changes in age composition and other factors all point to significant declines in stock abundance.  The stock appears to be growth overfished and perhaps in danger of recruitment overfishing.”

Pollock posed a problem for the stock assessors, as the data was somewhat confounding.  However, signals were clear enough that they could conclude that

“Short-term projections based on 1985 stock levels indicate a probably reduction in stock biomass and catch in the near future regardless of the level of fishing mortality applied.  If [fishing mortality] is held at the 1985 level (0.73) through 1987, landings will decline by 54% and age 3+ stock biomass will be reduced by 42% from the 1985 level.  If [fishing mortality] is reduced to 0.33 by 1987, landings will decline by approximately 73% and stock biomass will decline by 35% from 1985 levels.”

In other words, none of those stocks were in very good shape.  

Unfortunately, back in 1986, stock assessments of New England groundfish didn’t add very much value to the debate, simply because the fishermen who comprised the majority of members of the New England Fishery Management Council, which managed all three stocks, more-or-less ignored them

Back then, ten years before passage of the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996, which required federal fishery managers to end overfishing and rebuild stocks, the existing law of the land was the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, which required managers to get “optimum yield” out of fish stocks.  And in that law, optimum yield was defined as

“the amount of fish—which will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, with particular reference to food production and recreational opportunities; and which is prescribed on the basis of the maximum sustainable yield from such fishery, as modified by any relevant economic, social, or ecological factor.  [emphasis added; internal numbering deleted]”

So the stock assessment might suggest that overfishing was taking place, and that landings exceeded the maximum sustainable yield.  However, all the New England Council needed to decide was that fishermen could make more money if allowed to overfish even an already overfished stock, and such an “economic factor” allowed them to set an optimum yield that was too high to be sustainable.

Even after the Sustainable Fisheries Act put an end to explicitly allowing overfishing, and supposedly required that landings be no higher than the maximum sustainable yield, the New England Council got around the requirement by not adopting annual catch limits for groundfish stocks.  

Instead, they used alternative management measures that appeared to work on paper, and have at least a 50-50 chance of preventing overfishing, such as establishing limits on how many fish could be harvested on any trip, and limiting the days that any one permitted vessel could be at sea.

Alternative management measures didn’t work.  Without hard-poundage annual catch limits to instill discipline in fishermen, overfishing continued and the stocks of all three species continued to decline.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation Act, which governs all federal fisheries, was reauthorized in 2006, and largely because of the New England Council’s failures, annual catch limits were finally required for nearly all managed stocks.  However, for cod and winter flounder, it was already too late.

The most recent operational assessment of the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic stock, the stock of flounder found in waters between  southern Massachusetts and New Jersey, remains badly overfished, with abundance just 18% of the level that would produce maximum sustainable yield.   The last benchmark assessment had is too little data to determine whether that is also true of the Gulf of Maine stock.  Given that the overall catch has fallen 95% since the 1980s, there’s little reason to believe that it’s doing well.

Cod stocks are in far worse condition.  The Gulf of Maine stock is still subject to overfishing, and is badly overfished, languishing at somewhere between 5% and 8% of the biomass needed to produce maximum sustainable yield.  

Data problems make it impossible to fully assess the Georges Bank stock, but it, too, is believed to be overfished, based on the “poor stock condition.”

Pollock still present a challenging problem, due to uncertain data.  However, they do not appear to be either overfished or subject to overfishing.  At the same time, the loss of the spring run at Block Island suggest that they are no longer as abundant as they once were.

Although the improvements to Magnuson-Stevens, made over the last twenty years, came too late to assure that many New England groundfish populations will rebuild at any time soon, they have led to the recovery of 44 other once-overfished stocks (including a few in New England), and they have relieved the overfishing that  once plagued a number of others.  

Yet today, there is legislation in Washington that would threaten to repeat the mistakes of the past.

H.R. 200, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fishery Management Act, is the worst of them in that regard.  It would again allow economics to be a consideration in establishing annual catch limits, and would create many exceptions to the current requirement that annual catch limits be included in management plans.  It would also create a number of exceptions to the requirement that overfishing be ended and fish stocks rebuilt within a time certain, some so broadly worded that they could apply to just about any fish, and delay rebuilding indefinitely.

H.R. 200 also contains elements of H.R. 2023, the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act, which would largely exempt anglers from the strictures of annual catch limits, which it would replace with "alternative" measures, even when anglers cause most of the fishing mortality in a particular stock.  H.R. 2023 would also delay stock rebuilding and severely water down the requirements for the “best science available.”  It's  Senate companion, S. 1520, is much less malign in its current form; still, it can’t become law without being reconciled with whatever passes in the House, and the result only be something bad.

Thus, conservation minded folks should stand opposed to them all.

Which brings us back to St. Patrick’s Day.

We can’t fish for flounders any more.  

But after you raise your glass of Bushmills, and drink a mournful toast to the Last Feast of the Fianna, and another to the martyrs of the Rising, fill it once again for the flounder and other fisheries that we have lost. 

Then swear an oath by the sun, moon and wind that you will do all in your power to see that our laws remain strong, to keep us from losing any more.