FISHING, EASTER AND TIMES GONE BY

When I was a boy, I had very mixed feelings about the Easter season.

On the plus side, there were chocolate rabbits, jelly beans, and Cadbury eggs.  I lived in Connecticut then, where Good Friday was a state holiday, so there was also the welcome prospect of a day off from school.

But I was never sure that those good things outweighed the downside.  I grew up in a Polish Catholic household, and in those days, that meant that the religious aspects of Eastertide were very, very much at the fore. 

Good Friday was a day of “fasting and abstinence.” No one in then house was allowed to eat a bit of food until the evening meal, and even then, meat wasn’t an option.  My mother also insisted that, as part of the ritual mourning, both TV and radio were strictly off limits.  So as soon as I was old enough to leave the yard on my own (which was very young in those far simpler days), I hoped that Good Friday brought good enough weather to let me escape the house and its seasonal dolor first thing in the morning, and spend the day outside.

Not surprisingly, I’d end up somewhere near water.  

Sometimes, I arranged to meet friends at the boatyard, where my father stored our 18-foot Lyman over the winter and we were allowed to fish off of the docks.  By Easter weekend, flounder would already be stirring in the river, along with the tomcod that had been active all winter beneath the ice that, in some years, had only melted away a few weeks before.

The flounder that I usually brought home from such sessions represented a significant upgrade to the planned meatless meal, which would have otherwise been built around canned Starkist tuna or the frozen and slightly freezer-burnt remains of fish caught the season before.

Other times, particularly when Easter came late and I was a bit older, we’d meet at the Mianus River dam, where river herring stacked up by the thousand as they tried to run upstream.  We weren’t the only folks with Good Friday off, so the parking lot at the dam was often filled with cars with out of town plates, while the banks of the river was lined with people doing their best to intercept the herring run.

It was the only time in my life when I flirted, in a very small way, with the commercial fishery.  There were no rules or licenses back then, at least with respect to what we all called “bony herring.”  But there were plenty of city folks who were willing to buy herring, and were just as happy to sit on the bank and take nips from their hip flasks rather than catch their own, if they could find anyone willing to sell.

On Good Friday, it was usually a seller’s market.  Later in the season, when the water was warm and the run was peaking, you could wade in with dip nets, catch loads of herring and sell them to the New Yorkers for maybe $5 per bushel.  But on Good Friday, the water was cold, and the run was still sparse and newly begun.  The fish tended to stay below the Route 1 bridge, a couple of hundred yards below the dam, and close to the bottom, where dip netters couldn’t get at them.

But we had learned how to catch those early-run fish.  We’d line up on the wall at the town parking garage (a place long since closed to such public access), casting out treble hooks with our spinning rods and allowing them to sink down to the bottom, where the herring swam slowly and were easy to snag.  After we’d each caught a dozen or so, we’d cross back over the road to the dam parking lot, where eager and often slightly inebriated buyers were willing to pay 25 cents apiece for our fish.  Then we’d go back across the road and do it again.

We can laugh at such trivial transactions today, but being a 10-year-old back in ’65, with six or eight bucks in your pocket that you earned by your very own hand, was to be sitting close to the top of the world.

And it certainly beat sitting around in a silent Good Friday house, listening to your stomach grumble and waiting for the day to slowly grind to its end.

The problem was that things didn’t get much better on Easter. 

It was supposed to be a “joyous” holiday—and yes, there were those chocolate (hopefully, solid chocolate) rabbits—but somehow the concept of “joy” got twisted around into dressing up in fancy clothes and hanging around with family for the rest of the day.  You weren’t even allowed to fish.

And wasn’t that what Sundays were for?

My father worked Monday through Friday, and on Saturday mornings, too.  So Sundays were his only days off, and when they came around, for much of the year, they started with the earliest Mass at our church.  On the way home from church, we’d stop at the tackle shop for bait; after that, we’d go home, change, grab our fishing gear and head out on the boat for the rest of the day.

But on Easter, you didn’t buy bait, you didn’t fish, and you didn’t even change out of your church clothes into something you might get dirty or torn.  That never seemed particularly joyous to me.

I’m not sure that my father was all-in on it either, but it was important to my mother, so he went along. 

Even so, I remember one Easter morning when we at least got to go outside, and headed to the town park at Greenwich Point to fly a kite.  We picked a spot on a secluded beach, near the Old Greenwich Boat Club’s small dock.  But while we had the beach to ourselves, and soon had the kite soaring in the wind off the Sound, we noticed that there was someone on the dock who was fishing on Easter morning.

He was catching nice flounder, too.  Every ten or fifteen minutes, he’d drop one in his pail.  It got to the point that my father started longingly saying, perhaps to himself, “That was a good one…he just got one more…”

My mother was not amused.

But all that happened fifty-plus years ago, and since then, the world has moved on.

Today, anyone who let their nine or ten year old sons out of their sight—much less out of their yards—and allowed them to sit, unsupervised, to fish off empty docks floating on a cold, early spring river would probably be reported to the child welfare folks.

And I can’t think of the fate that might befall any parents who let the same boys associate and strike deals with not-quite-sober strangers along the banks of a deep tidal stream.

You can try to convince me that kids are better off now, with their tight leashes and sports teams, and maybe you’re right.  In the end, it doesn’t make a real difference, because the fish that created my sort of childhood have largely disappeared.

The winter flounder we caught in the rivers are gone.  There were days when, as I boy, I caught a dozen or more soaking worms off a dock—no chumming, no thought, just casually fishing.  Last year, there were so few caught in the entire state of Connecticut that National Marine Fisheries Service surveyors could not find even a single angler who had taken one home.  

The tomcod are gone as well, not only from Connecticut, but from all the northeast.  The same NMFS surveyors haven’t recorded any recreational landings at all—anywhere—since 2010.

The herring in the Mianus River have fared a little better.  The run nearly collapsed years ago, but the state has since built a fish ladder alongside the dam, and river herring can once again reach their freshwater spawning grounds.  While the run is much smaller than it was fifty or sixty years ago, it appears to have stabilized at a sustainable level, and is not under immediate threat.

Even so, you can't fish for them any more.  The crowds, the dip netters, the entire spring circus, is gone.

So these days, there’s not much point fishing on Easter anymore, at least not in salt water, even if your family didn’t complain.  We have lost much in the past 50-plus years, and when I say that, looking back on my time as a boy, I’m not just talking about the fish.

WHAT'S NEXT FOR STRIPED BASS

For better or worse, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission adopted Addendum VI to Amendment 6 to the Atlantic Striped Bass Interstate Fishery Management Plan last October, and in February, the ASMFC ruled on the various states’ conservation equivalency proposals, and let two of them, New Jersey and Maryland, evade at least a portion of their original responsibilities under Addendum VI.

And for a while, that’s where it looked like things would stand; the ASMFC would implement a flawed—and perhaps doomed—effort to reduce fishing mortality all the way back to the target level, and completely ignore its obligation under the management plan to rebuild the bass stock within ten years.

It’s possible that, in a couple of years, the ASMFC might think about trying to eventually rebuild the stock when it considers a new Amendment 7 to the management plan.  Back in May 2019, a motion to begin such an Amendment, once Addendum VI was out of the way done, was put on the table, but that motion was postponed until the August meeting, then postponed again from August to this coming May, when most people expected the motion to pass—although whether the new amendment would really do anything to rebuild the spawning stock, or simply declared a diminished stock to be the new normal, was the subject of much debate, with a lot of folks who’ve watched how the ASMFC operates over the years betting pretty heavily on the latter outcome.

However, because of COVID-19 and associated restrictions on travel and meeting, the May ASMFC meeting will be held via webinar, with only the most essential actions to be taken.  The vote on beginning a new striped bass amendment will be delayed again, at least until the August Management Board meeting—assuming that the pandemic abates and meetings can be held by then.  So any possible effort to rebuild the stock will be pushed off that much longer.

Thus, at least for the foreseeable future, the striped bass’ fate is going to depend on Addendum VI, and its success in reducing fishing mortality to a sustainable level.  That success, in turn, is going to depend on whether the assumptions about angler behavior that underlie the Addendum accurately reflect what recreational fishermen actually do in real life, and on the timely and accurate monitoring of fishermen’s effort, catch and landings, to determine whether the management measures included in the Addendum are going to come close to getting the job done.

COVID-19 may have tossed all of those assumptions, and the ability to adequately monitor fishing activity, out the window.  But exactly how fallout from the virus might impact the striped bass fishery isn’t currently clear, and there’s no indication that things might get better any time soon.

Consider angling effort. 

Addendum VI assumed that anglers would react to the big 2015 striped bass year class in about the same way that they reacted to the large 2011 year class when it passed through the Chesapeake Bay and out onto the coast.  Otherwise, the Addendum assumed angler behavior was going to be the same as it was in 2017.  

With many people out of work as a result of the current pestilence, there is the possibility that angler effort will be heavier than expected, as people turn to the water to escape their homes for a while.  Such behavior has already been reported from the New Jersey side of Raritan Bay, where the season is open and anglers are showing up in droves to kill the big female bass staging ahead of their spawning run up the Hudson River.  Once the New York season opens on April 15, the landings in that bay will only increase.

Some states are encouraging people to get outside and go fishing, so long as they maintain proper distance from others.  Should idled workers turn to striped bass, whether for food or recreation, in greater than usual numbers up and down the coast, fishing mortality might not decrease as much as expected.  There’s a chance—although probably a very slim one—that it won’t decrease at all.

On the other hand, there are also forces militating against increased angling effort.  

People who lose their jobs, even temporarily, are less likely to have money to spend on recreational activities.  Many states, including both New York and New Jersey, have deemed party and charter boats “nonessential businesses,” and have temporarily closed them down in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19.  Other jurisdictions, including local municipalities, have shut down various beaches, marinas, boat ramps, fishing piers, parks and similar public facilities, making it more difficult for anglers to access the striped bass resource.

One state, Maryland, took a contrarian stance, and allowed its party and charter boats to continue doing business, with a maximum of 10 persons on board, but shut down all private boat and shore-based recreational fishing unless the anglers involved were fishing for food.  Catch and release striped bass fishing will be prohibited for the duration of the crisis.

The success of Addendum VI may hinge, at least in the short term, on whether the forces that could lead to increased angling effort are strong enough to overwhelm both the regulations adopted in response to the Addendum and the forces likely to cause an effort decline.

That may ultimately prove difficult, or impossible, to figure out.

Normally, the Marine Recreational Information Program’s catch and effort surveys would have begun in March, and increased in frequency as the fishing season got underway.  By mid-June, the first, preliminary numbers for striped bass landings would be released, and managers could get their first look at whether recreational catch, effort, and landings are responding to the new regulations.  As the season progressed, more and more data would be collected, and the impacts of Addendum VI could be gauged.

But this year, MRIP may not be operating normally.  I’ve already heard anecdotal reports suggesting that at least one northeastern state has decided not to hire about a dozen surveyors, who would normally be collecting catch data from anglers, presumably because dealing with anyone in-person these days can be bad for your health.  If that report is true, and if other states follow suit, managers could end up flying blind, with either no or insufficient reliable data on 2020 striped bass catch and landings. 

And that’s only on the recreational side.

Commercial landings, while far easier to document, may also prove difficult to predict.  Right now, due largely to restaurant closures, commercial fishermen are having difficulty selling not only striped bass, but just about everything that they catch.  Even when markets accept their fish, the prices have fallen through the floor.  That could reduce commercial fishing activity, as fishermen hope that if they wait to land their individual quotas, the price might rebound later in the year as travel and dining restrictions are relaxed.  It’s also possible that, if they land fish right now, they can sell them to local markets, while if they wait, they might not be able to land their full quota before the season ends.

There are just too many unknowns.

If COVID-19 plateaus this month, as one widely-respected model predicts, it’s possible that people will be back at their jobs, back in their boats, and back on the beaches, and that the for-hire fleet will be sailing, before too much of the bass season is lost.  If that occurs, states will probably be able to collect anglers’ catch data, commercial fishermen will be able to sell their product, and the year, though far from normal in many ways, won’t cause too many problems for striped bass managers.

On the other hand, if the virus hangs on, and disrupts business and pleasure for much of the season, 2020 could well prove to be a lost year for the striped bass, a kind of Twilight Zone where management stands still, insufficient data is gathered, and the state of the stock remains, in part, unknown.

Given the current crisis, those things may be unavoidable.  But what is avoidable is doing harm to the bass once the crisis is past.

I have very little doubt that, once things return to semi-normal, we'll be hearing lots of talk about "restoring the economy," and that part of that talk will be cries to "let people fish" by relaxing regulations to allow fishermen, and fishing-related businesses, to make up for lost time.

Heeding such calls would be a mistake; impoverishing the future, in an effort to ensure today's prosperity, has never worked out very well.

Once COVID-19 is under control, and our own health has been secured, we need to ensure that the health of the striped bass, and all of our natural resources, are not sacrificed in the name of “the economy,” or for any other reason.  

As always, caution is advised.

AS A NEW FISHING SEASON BEGINS

Every season is different.

I’ve been fishing for more than sixty years, and if I think back on that time, I can’t find any two seasons that were exactly the same.  Comparisons get a little fuzzy when I look back at the years when my age could be expressed with a single digit, but even then, I remember change.

So as April 2020 begins, kicking off a new season, I have to sit back and wonder what sort of change this year will bring.

Usually, change is driven by weather, water temperature and the like, overprinted with the natural and human-driven impacts on fish populations.  Cold winters that linger typically slow up the start of the season, while warm winters, like the one that just passed, see the action start sooner.  Big schools of menhaden are already moving along the coast, and entering Long Island’s bays.  On those scores, we’re already ahead of the curve.

Based on the abundance of the fish themselves, 2020 looks like a mixed bag.

April 1 saw the start of the winter flounder season, but that doesn’t mean much anymore.  Back in 2004, New York anglers took home more than 14 million of the little flatfish, but the population collapsed years ago.  Last year’s estimate for the entire state was about 400, althought the number of fish actually sampled in anglers’ catch was so small that such estimate is wildly imprecise.  I haven’t actively pursued flounder for many years, and that is something that won’t, unfortunately, change in this season.

April 1 also saw the start of the spring blackfish (more properly, “tautog”) season.  April 2019 was largely a bust; while New York anglers landed nearly 650,000 blackfish last year, only about 150 of those were caught in the spring.  But the water was cold in 2019; this year’s ocean is warmer, and it’s not impossible that I’ll be sitting over a wreck trying my luck before the month ends.  If the blackfish aren’t chewing, there’s still a fair chance that a cod or some ling (a/k/a “red hake”) will render a wreck trip worthwhile.

Striped bass remain overfished, but there should be a lot of undersized fish from the 2015 year class moving along the coast, and enough legal fish from the 2011 around to let anglers who feel so inclined to take a fish home.  New regulations that became effective on the first of this month, and are intended to protect the largest members of the spawning stock, require all bass measuring 35 inches or more to be released.

Bluefish are overfished as well; there will undoubtedly be local pockets of abundance popping up throughout the year, but don’t be surprised if bluefish are scarcer than stripers.  On the plus side, there’s reason to believe that weakfish might be a bit more abundant; New York anglers caught about 350,000 of them last year (including those that were released), by far the highest number caught in the past five years, and nearly triple the number caught in 2018.

Otherwise, the inshore scene should see a lot of short fluke—reports are that 2018 finally broke the long stretch of below-average recruitment, and saw good numbers of young fish enter the population—a few very large ones, and not much in between.  Black sea bass and scup should remain very abundant, although at somewhat lower abundance levels than we enjoyed in in 2019.

Offshore, the picture is also spotty.  Based on last year, we should see good numbers of bluefin tuna, provided that we get enough sand eels south of Long Island to keep the fish around; given our recent warm winter, that’s hardly assured.  We should also see decent numbers of thresher sharks, with many inside the 20-fathom line, but that, too, is dependent on bait, primarily menhaden and the recently abundant chub mackerel.

Otherwise, the news isn’t as good.  Mako sharks and bigeye tuna are both badly overfished, as are blue and white marlin.  Yellowfin haven’t been truly abundant in years, and in recent seasons, longfin albacore have all but disappeared from our local canyons.   But sometimes, when water conditions are right, there is always the chance for a hot tuna bite to break out.  That’s a change we can hope for.

But the biggest change affecting this season will undoubtedly be caused COVID-19, and its impacts not only on people’s health, but on the commercial and recreational fishing industries, and on the fish themselves.  And that’s very hard to predict.

Some people have speculated that relatively few will go fishing, and that stocks such as striped bass will thus get a much-needed reprieve.  At the same time, fishing remains a legal activity, marinas and gas docks are open, and there are a lot of bored people who are staying at home with little to do.  It’s possible, given that situation, that fishing pressure will be higher than it is in a normal year.  At least in some places, there are signs that the latter case may prove to be true.

At the same time, fishing isn’t free, and with unemployment spiking, many people may prioritize paying their rent and buying food above recreation.  That could limit the number of people who end up going fishing.  While fishing, in theory, might be a way to put food on the table, the reality is that fishing from shore can be inexpensive, but is usually not too productive; fishing from a boat can be very productive, but the related costs make it cheaper to buy fish at a store. 

Given the competing considerations, trying to gauge angling effort in the upcoming year can yield little more than a guess.

At the same time, there are some current certainties.  In many jurisdictions, including New York, both party and charter boats are deemed “non-essential businesses,” and have been shut down to avoid spreading the virus.  It’s not clear how long such shut down will last.  So long as it does, some anglers will lose their only access to the fishery, and if it lasts too long, some boats could go out of business. 

Shutting down the for-hire fleet won’t have much of an impact on fish stocks, as for-hire vessels are responsible for a very small percentage of all angling trips and a relatively small portion of overall landings, but it could have a very big impact on some fishermen, and on the businesses involved.  At the same time, it could reduce fishing pressure on some wrecks and artificial reefs that see fish numbers, and fish size, decline quickly in the face of relentless angling effort.

Reduced commercial fishing pressure could have more of an impact.  Restaurants in New York, and most coastal states, have been shuttered in an effort to slow down COVID-19; since a large proportion of locally-caught seafood is sold to restaurants, that has severely reduced demand for commercially caught fish up and down the coast.  A recent article in Virginia’s Eastern Shore Post describes the plight of a black sea bass fisherman, saying that

“’We talked to the Bronx market [in New York City] yesterday,’ he said…’and they said our fish company was 40% down from normal,’ but because sea bass has such a large Asian clientele, he was told, ‘Do not go fishing.  We will not buy your fish,’ so we are at zero.’”

In response, the fisherman is trying to sell fish locally, to the general public, but is moving far less product than he would if the markets were open.

Similar stories are playing out in many commercial fisheries.  In Montauk, New York, a trawler returned to the dock with 1,000 pounds of fluke (a/k/a “summer flounder”), found no market for his fish, and ended up giving it away.  The price of fluke in Montauk, when a market will take it, has fallen from $3.00 to $0.50 per pound; scup has fallen from $1.25 to as little as $0.10 per pound.  At those prices, fishermen can’t turn a profit, and have little reason to leave the dock.

Given that the commercial sector has been allocated the greater share of both summer flounder and scip, a lack of commercial fishing effort could have a real impact on such species’ abundance this season.

It all depends on how long the “social distancing” lasts. 

A new model produced at the University of Washington predicts that New York will reach the peak of its pandemic, in terms of health resource use, on April 9, and that the peak daily death rate will occur one day later.  Before the month is over, we will have largely weathered the current storm.  That model assumes that social distancing will continues through May 31.

That’s two more months of closed restaurants for the commercial fleet, and two more months when the for-hire fleet couldn’t sail.   That would seriously impinge on the for-hire fleet’s season.  Although they do some odd charters for striped bass and bottom fish in April, the fleet’s real money season begins when fluke opens on May 4.  Losing the entire month of May would cause some real harm.  And, once the for-hire boats are allowed to sail again, there’s no guarantee that many of their customers will have either the money or the desire to book trips right away.  It might take a few weeks, or even months, of normalcy before that occurs.

Right now, nothing is cast in stone.

If nothing changes, it appears that both surfcasters and private boats will be allowed to fish throughout the year.  Beaches may well be more crowded as anglers, banned from their usual workplaces, seek some sort of distraction.  Boat fishermen may find the water more crowded, too, although it is just as likely that unemployed anglers will cut back on their time on the water in order to cut back on expenses in a time of need.  Anglers who depend on for-hire vessels to access the resource could be out of luck for a while.  It’s not clear when party and charter boats will be allowed to sail again; it could happen this month, although June 1 is probably a more realistic target.

For the fish, COVID-19 might not have much effect.  More anglers fishing from the beach won’t significantly increase recreational landings, and the current ban on for-hire angling won’t significantly decrease them.  On the other hand, restaurant closings could significantly curtail commercial fishing activity for a while, and if that happens, it could have a positive impact on at least some fish stocks.  But even that will vary from species to species; primarily recreational fish, such as striped bass, bluefish and black sea bass, won’t benefit much, while primarily commercial species, such as summer flounder, might be positively affected.

Today, that’s all speculation.

But that’s the way every new season starts.  Only time can tell whether our predictions come true.

Still, the course of this season is cloudier than most.  Let’s just hope that we’re all able to see it through to its end.

LITTLE REASON TO RELAX BLUEFIN PROTECTIONS

On March 30, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that it was relaxing long-time protections intended to reduce the number of Atlantic bluefin tuna killed and, in the past, discarded by the pelagic longline fleet.

Pelagic longliners are not supposed to target bluefin tuna.  However, longlines are not selective, and bluefin tuna, like shortfin mako sharks and white and blue marlin, are often unintended victims of longline gear.  While longliners are allocated some of the bluefin tuna quota to cover such incidental catch, past regulations often resulted in far too many bluefin being returned, dead, to the sea,

Until about five years ago, longliners’ dead bluefin discards were a big conservation issue.  Things were particularly bad along the edge of the continental shelf south of Long Island/east of New Jersey during the spring, when schools of big bluefin were headed back to their summer feeding grounds off New England and maritime Canada.  I still remember going to National Marine Fisheries Service hearings during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, and listening to local longliners complain about how many giants they were discarding dead after retaining the one fish per trip that regulations back then allowed.

Finally, in 1999, NMFS created the “Northeast United States Closed Area,” which prohibited longliners from fishing in those waters during the month of June.  Such closure was predicted to reduce bluefin bycatch by 55 percent, while having no material impact on the landings of swordfish and other target species.

In 2005, further amendments to the fishery management plan created additional closed areas.  One, the Cape Hatteras Gear Restricted Area, ran from December 1 to April 30.  That gear restricted area was designed to address a unique problem, that saw a small portion of the longline fleet produce “a high level of bluefin interactions;” the remainder of the fleet didn’t produce that much bluefin bycatch.  So the Cape Hatteras Gear Restricted Area wasn’t closed to all longline fishing.  Access to the area was

“granted based on an annual assessment of pelagic longline vessels using performance-based metrics.  Pelagic longline vessels [were] evaluated on their ratio of bluefin interactions to designated species landings, compliance with the Pelagic Observer Program, and timely submission of logbooks.”

Based on those standards, nearly 80 percent of longliners fishing in the region were allowed to continue fishing during the supposed closure.

The other closed area—actually, two nearby closed areas—was created in the Gulf of Mexico, where western stock bluefin tuna spawn.  Collectively designated the “Gulf of Mexico Gear Restricted Area,” it was closed to longliners from April 1 through May 31, to protect the spawning bluefin. 

An additional measure intended to prevent longline bycatch of bluefin was the institution of a “weak hook” requirement 2011, which mandated that longliners fishing in the Gulf of Mexico only use hooks made from relatively thin-gauge wire, that would more easily straighten in response to the struggles of mature bluefin tuna, but would retain the swordfish and other tunas targeted by the Gulf longline fleet.  It wasn’t a perfect solution, but

“Research results showed that weak hooks showed that the use of weak hooks can significantly reduce the amount of bluefin tuna caught by pelagic longline vessels.  Some reductions in the amount of target catch of yellowfin tuna and swordfish were noted but were not statistically significant.”

Even so, bluefin bycatch remained high.  During the years 2012-2014, the longliners bluefin catch exceeded the longline bycatch quota by 365 percent, 972 percent, and 210 percent, respectively.  Much  that catch was discarded dead.

So in 2015, NMFS adopted Amendment 7 to the fishery management plan.  In addition to creating the Cape Hatteras and Gulf of Mexico gear restricted areas described above, the Amendment adopted a number of other measures to protect bluefin tuna. 

Among those was a catch share program, the Individual Bluefin Quota management system, that divided the overall longline bluefin quota into shares allocated to each permitted vessel, based on that vessel’s bluefin catch history.  Longline vessels will no longer be allowed to discard legal-sized bluefin tuna; all fish must be landed.  Once a vessel has landed its share of the bluefin longline quota, it must either lease or otherwise obtain additional quota from another vessel, or exit the pelagic longline fishery for the remainder of that fishing year.  Should the entire longline quota be caught in any fishing year, the pelagic longline fishery would be completely shut down until a new fishing year began.

To better assure that longline vessels accurately report all bluefin caught, Amendment 7 also requires that pelagic longline vessels install and properly maintain video cameras placed in locations that allow them to record all fish brought aboard.  Such video can then be monitored to assure vessel compliance with the bluefin regulations.

On the negative side, the Amendment also increased the annual longline bluefin quota by 62.5 metric tons, obtained by reducing the quotas from other permit categories; for example, the general category, that amounts for most U.S. bluefin landings, was reduced by 32 million metric tons, while 13.4 metric tons were taken away from the recreational quota.  Supposedly, that was done  

“to more fully and predictably account for Longline category incidental bluefin catch, including both dead discards and landings,”

but it’s hard not to see it as rewarding the longliners for their use of destructive and non-selective gear, as every other provision of Amendment 7 would have still worked without the increase in quota, although without such increase, the pelagic longline fleet would have been forced to curtail its operations much sooner each fishing year.

On balance, Amendment 7 seems to have achieved its goals.  During the years 2015, 2016, and 2017, after the amendment’s adoption, the pelagic longline fleet didn’t’ come close to landing its quota, never landing more than 51 percent of its quota in any fishing year.  While those numbers aren’t directly comparable to the big overages of 2012-2014, due to the substantial increase in the Longline category quota, the absolute numbers still tell a positive, if somewhat more subdued, story:  For the period 2012-2014, longliners caught an average of 233 metric tons of bluefin per year, while for the period 2015-2017, that average fell to just 81.3 metric tons, a reduction of 65 percent.

All of the anti-bycatch regulations seem to be working, but NMFS has now decided to change its approach.  Like a lot of bad ideas coming out of Washington these days, the new managemengt changes are based on a professed desire to “reduce regulatory burden” and “simplify and streamline” the regulatory process.

There is also an expressed desire to help the U.S. pelagic longline fleet come closer to catching its full swordfish quota, something that it hasn’t come close to doing in recent years.  There is a fear that, if the United States keeps falling short of catching its quota, that quota will be reallocated to other nations.  NMFS sees easing bluefin protections as one way to achieve that goal.  

Thus, it has abolished the Cape Hatteras Gear Restricted Area altogether, and has downgraded the Northeast United States Closed Area and Gulf of Mexico Gear Restricted Area to “monitoring areas” for three years, where longliners will again be able to fish; if they exceed certain levels—72 percent of the Atlantic Longline quota, or 55 percent of the Gulf Longline quota—the affected area will be closed for the remainder of the three-year period.  Once that period is over, the need for both areas will be reevaluated.

In addition, longliners in the Gulf of Mexico will only be required to use weak hooks between January and June, and not for the entire year.

While such actions might have made longliners happy, they were not well received elsewhere.

The Pew Charitable Trusts noted that

“after decades of mismanagement and overfishing the population today is a little more than half of what it was in 1974, when it was already depleted,”

and pointed out that under current quotas,

“[International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas] scientists project the western Atlantic population won’t continue to rebuild but will, in fact, decline.”

Pew argues that

“After NOAA Fisheries implemented the [gear restricted areas] in 2015, the average number of bluefin tuna hooked on longlines during April and May dropped by 82 percent compared with the average for those months for 2006 through 2012.  This remarkable reduction in mortality exists only for the closure months, indicating that the [gear restricted areas], not other regulations, are responsible for this success.”

The nation’s largest marine recreational fishing and boating organizations voiced similar concerns, while an editorial in Sport Fishing magazine scornfully observed,

“Despite [the] restriction pertaining to only two small areas (small in relation to the entire Gulf) and only for two months (April and May), it worked.  Following NMFS’ creation of these limited GRAs, the number of bluefin hooked by longlines during these months has dropped by more than 80 percent.

“Before these restrictions, the longline fleet was annually discarding (by law) nearly 70 metric tons of dead Gulf bluefin, exceeding the quota that NMFS allowed it by as much as 218 percent.  Today, they no longer exceed that quota.

“In other words, this program has been an unqualified success.

“So what do you do with a program that has been achieving its goals?

“Why, you weaken or kill it, of course.”

NMFS justifications for its actions were neither as vehement nor as convincing.  In reading all of the agency’ comments, it’s difficult to understand just why the bluefin regulations needed to be relaxed.

Start with the premise that it’s all about swordfish, that NMFS was concerned that the U.S. might lose a part of its quota to another nation if it didn’t start landing more swords.  That’s certainly a legitimate concern.  But will weakening the bluefin regulations really lead to U.S. longliners landing more swordfish?

Maybe not.  And that’s according to NMFS.  

As mentioned above, NMFS has already stated that the Northeast United States Closed area would cause no “substantial changes to target [swordfish] catch,” and that any reductions in swordfish catch attributable to the use of weak hooks in the Gulf of Mexico “were not statistically significant.”  Thus, it’s difficult to argue that weakening those measures can be justified on the basis of increased swordfish landings.

Even so, is it possible that the Individual Bluefin Quota management system was so successful that the other regulations have become redundant and unnecessary?  And have those regulations actually caused U.S. swordfish landings to fall?

NMFS isn’t making a case for that, either.  Instead, in its Three-Year Review of the Individual Bluefin Quota program, NMFS wrote

“The specific regulations that provided the most incentives for vessel operators to avoid bluefin were the IBQ accounting requirements.  The potential need for vessel owners to lease additional IBQ allocation in order to account for bluefin catch and satisfy the minimum IBQ Program requirements, and the cost of such leasing, provided additional incentive to avoid bluefin tuna during pelagic longline fishing operations.”

But immediately after that statement, NMFS also wrote

“It is difficult to attribute the overall reduction in bluefin catch to a specific fishing behavior, due to the number of factors that affect catch in a commercial fishery, and the number of factors affecting fishing behavior in addition to the IBQ program.

“…it is difficult to separate out the influence of the IBQ Program from other factors, including the effect of swordfish imports on the market for U.S. product, or other regulations such as closed and gear restricted areas, as well as target species availability/price.  [emphasis added]”

So, by NMFS’ own admission, the decline in bluefin bycatch might well be attributable to the closed areas that it has now reopened, and not to the IBQ catch share program. 

And if that is the case, then opening up the former closed areas might have been a very bad idea.

When all is said and done, it seems that even NMFS doesn’t really believe that weakening bluefin regulations, as they did on March 30, will either guarantee the bluefin sufficient protection or increase U.S. swordfish landings.  It might do both.  It might do neither.  It might do something in-between.

What we seem to be dealing with isn’t a well thought-out rule based on data, but rather the dilution of one more conservation measure, that was sacrificed on the altar of “streamlining” regulations and easing the “regulatory burden,” a trend we’ve seen far too much of in the last three years or so.

Bluefin tuna, and bluefin tuna fishermen, deserve better than that.

COULD ANADROMOUS FISH BECOME VICTIMS OF COVID-19?

COVID-19 only affects mammals.  

Depending on what version of its origin story we’re told, it began in bats, or maybe in pangolins.  There is a very real chance that it may have resulted from two different viruses that arose, separately, in both of those animals, that subsequently combined and went on to jump species and infect Homo sapiens, which has managed to spread the infection planet-wide.

There are a lot of other things that are unknown, or at least uncertain, about the virus, but one thing seems clear:  Fish are immune from infection.  It’s one of the advantages of not having lungs.

But that doesn’t mean that fish won't become victims of COVID-19.  This is the time of year when rivers run high, and anadromous fish, such as striped bass, shad and salmon, return from the sea to their upstream spawning grounds.  

And most of the rivers they spawn in are far from pristine.

Over the past 400 years or so, since the first European settlers put down roots in what would, in time, become the United States, our coastal rivers have suffered from multiple insults.  They have been dammed, and their shores denuded of timber.  They have become dumping grounds for sewage and industrial waste.  They have been dredged, their shores have been hardened, and their marshes drained.  Even up in their most remote headwaters, farms, golf courses, and other industries have been allowed to wash pesticides, excess fertilizer, manure and other pollutants into local waterways, through the spawning grounds, and into coastal estuaries.  

The health of the rivers declined.

In 1972, the United States finally found the courage to stand up to industry and adopt the Clean Water Act.  It began to reverse the carnage of centuries, and bring life back to some of the nation’s most damaged waterways.  After nearly fifty years, there was still a lot of work to be done, but a spawning population of striped bass was again thriving in the lower reaches of the once-hypoxic Delaware River, PCB-laden sediments were removed from the Hudson River and, after long litigation, regulations set a “total daily maximum load” for pollutants in rivers feeding into the Chesapeake Bay. 

Real progress had been made, but then COVID-19 intervened, and interrupted the patterns of human life, work and travel across the nation and the world.  Many people fell ill, and left their workplaces; far more stayed at home either voluntarily, or as those workplaces were shut down. 

Supposedly because of such illness and other COVID-related absences, on March 26, the United States Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be exercising “enforcement discretion” for entities’ failure to meet various environmental compliance obligations.

Intentional, criminal violations of environmental rules will not be excused, and the policy does not apply to Superfund sites or certain other enforcement instruments.  However, in other instances, the EPA has announced that

“The consequences of the pandemic may constrain the ability of regulated entities to perform routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training, and reporting or certification.

“…In general, the EPA does not expect to seek penalties for violations of routine compliance monitoring, integrity testing, sampling, laboratory analysis, training, and reporting or certification obligations in situations where the EPA agrees that COVID-19 was the cause of the noncompliance and the entity provides supporting documentation to the EPA upon request.”

On its face, the temporary policy doesn’t seem unreasonable.  There is, after all, a public health crisis going on, and as the virus continues to spread, it is very possible that companies won’t have sufficient staff on hand to conduct all of the necessary and routine environmental monitoring that it would perform during normal times.

But is staffing really the key issue?

Whether pollutants are released into the environment intentionally, negligently or because they slip past an inadequate monitoring regime, they do the same damage.  And in the spring, as anadromous fish run up rivers to their spawning ground, they are as badly impacted by an inadvertent pollution release as they are by intentional harmful discharges.  A shad, river herring or striped bass running past the extensive industrial chemical complexes on the Delaware River won’t survive a COVID-related toxic discharge any better than it would a discharge motivated purely by convenience and profit.

And, in the real world, there might not be any difference between the two.

The EPA’s temporary policy doesn’t, on its face, automatically let polluting companies off the hook.  It requires, among other things, that a company violating environmental standards

“Identify how COVID-19 was the cause of the noncompliance, and the decisions and actions taken in response, including best efforts to comply and steps taken to come into compliance.”

But that still leaves two problems outstanding:  The EPA has now established at least a temporary standard of not seeking penalties for noncompliance, which will undoubtedly remove some of industry’s incentive for doing things right.  And in the absence of required monitoring, sampling, laboratory analysis, etc., it’s not clear how the EPA or the relevant facility will even know that a pollution event occurred, and thus will be less able to both abate the event and report its occurrence.  

We may only learn of such events when hordes of fish begin floating and drifting downstream.

As John Walke, speaking for the Natural Resources Defense Council observed,

“There’s a direct link from monitoring to excessive pollution that may occur and may never be detected or reported to the public or regulators because of the direct grant of amnesty by the Trump EPA.”

An example provided in the March 28 edition of The Hill expanded on that problem.

“Critics say spikes in pollution from routine industrial operations will go unnoticed if no one is monitoring them, exceeding pollution levels allowed under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other laws.

“Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the EPA who previously served as director in the agency’s Office of Civil Enforcement, used benzene as an example.

“The cancer-causing substance can be leaked as oil refineries turn crude into fuel.  They’re often required to keep monitoring equipment in order to ensure high levels of benzine don’t leak into nearby neighborhoods.

“Schaeffer says the data the EPA normally collects shows companies can have spikes of as much as 10 times the legal limit.

“’If you don’t monitor, you don’t see the benzene, and then you have no obligation to do anything about it.  You don’t have the data to know if you need to act,’ he said.”

Comments like Schaeffer’s provide additional cause for concern when one learns that, as The Hill reported on March 26,

“In a 10-page letter to the EPA earlier this week, the American Petroleum Institute (API) asked for a suspension of the rules that require repairing leaky equipment as well as monitoring to make sure pollution doesn’t leak into nearby water.”

The American Petroleum Industry is hardly a model for environmental stewardship.  It represents an industry known for repeatedly causing very significant environmental harm through cost-cutting and negligent operations, as exemplified by the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills.  If the EPA's motivation for adopting the temporary policy was in any way connected to the petroleum industry's entreaties, the policy itself must be questioned.

And as The Hill also noted, in addition to creating threats to human health,

“The suspension of rules could also be damaging to waterways, which many plants are allowed to directly discharge chemicals into, so long as they ensure their effluent is sufficiently free of toxins.

“’If you don’t really have information about the toxicity of your discharges, you just go about your merry way without knowing if you’re discharging something acutely hazardous,’ Schaeffer said.”

Given that the nation is facing a crisis situation, where business—and, arguably, government regulation of business—can’t go on as usual, yet also given that, as the NRDC’s Walke notes,

“There are always bad actors in the industrial economy when it comes to environmental safeguards,”

did the EPA strike a reasonable balance between such competing concerns when adopting the temporary policy?

Probably not.

In the first instance, it comes down to a matter of corporate priorities.  Companies willing and able to staff their production lines should be just as willing to staff positions needed to maintain environmental safeguards.  Yes, some might get sick, or be otherwise absent, but that doesn’t prevent the companies for filling the slots with other personnel—even if that means paying overtime—to get the job done.  As Mr. Schaeffer noted,

“It is not clear why refineries, chemical plants, and other facilities that continue to operate and keep their employees on the production line will no longer have the staff or time they need to comply with environmental laws.”

Then, it also comes down to a matter of national priorities.  If a company cannot assure that it can run its production lines without causing harm to air and/or water, should the next step not be to take a long look at what such company is producing, and whether such products are essential to combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, or to otherwise maintaining the health and security of United States citizens?  

If production found to be non-essential cannot be maintained without an increased risk of pollution, shouldn’t such production be halted unless or until adequate monitoring and testing can be resumed?

Finally, the EPA probably made a mistake in promising a broad amnesty for non-compliant levels of monitoring, testing, etc.  Doing so can only incentivize corporate bean-counters to devise ways to avoid the expense of environmental compliance, and then crafting arguments that blame non-compliance on COVID-19.  

A better alternative would have left all compliance requirements, including penalties and fines, intact, while providing non-compliant companies the right to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that it made an effort to comply and would have done so had COVID-19 not made compliance impossible.

Such an approach would have left the supposed intent of the EPA’s temporary policy intact—companies would still be relieved of otherwise applicable penalties if they could prove that compliance failures were due solely to COVID-19—but any temptation to use COVID-19 as an excuse for lax compliance procedures would be deterred by imposing full penalties on any entity that could not prove that the virus was the sole cause of compliance failures.

Thus, the balance between protecting the public interest and accommodating legitimate industry concerns could have been struck, in a way that would better protect U.S. waterways, and U.S. residents, from harm.

Because COVID-19 will, in time, go away.  Eventually, most of us will survive, and when the virus is gone, we will want to get back out in the world and fully enjoy what it offers.

When that time comes, we want to be greeted by healthy rivers, estuaries and seas, and healthy fish populations that, perhaps, will even be a bit healthier than they were before we were compelled to stay in and near our homes.

The last thing we will need, in that time of healing, will be waters that run polluted and emptied of fish, so that corporate profits could thrive.