Highly Migratory Species Report & End of Year Recap

by John T. Koegler

(from Jersey Coast Anglers Association January 2001 Newsletter)

Court Managed Fisheries!

Those who voted in November are waiting for the courts to have the final word on who will be our next president. Such court proceedings have become the accepted US way of solving life's tougher issues. Do something someone does not like and you are lucky not to be facing a lawsuit. Some politicians use courts as they see fit regardless of the law.

New Fishery Management Plans (FMP) impose tougher controls on the commercial fishing industry. So it should come as no surprise that commercial fishermen are in court for major changes in any Fishery Management Plan. Recently most new Fishery plans have generated a lawsuit. NMFS, to avoid the stated but frequently not filed commercial fishermen lawsuit, loosens their proposed regulation before they become final. NMFS makes a stab a resolving the easier lawsuit issues. Generally the environmentalists disagree with any loosening of NMFS's original proposal. Anglers are caught in the middle.   

NMFS was the defendant in more than 110 lawsuits filed during the last two years. Only a few cases were settled out of court. Many are still to be heard. This has encouraged commercial fishermen to file a lawsuit anytime they do not like a Fishery Management Plan. Even if they lose, commercial fishermen continue fishing without the proposed tough new controls until the court process is complete. This usually takes years. Without fail the final commercial rules with the courts approval are more liberal than that which the management plan originally proposed. What is evolving is court-directed fishery management.

As a result, to avoid additional suits NMFS favors the commercial fishermen in their fish management plans. It should come as no surprise that the resource fails to rebound.  The Fishery Management Plan regulators search for ways to achieve objectives. The commercials continue to fish with only minor change in either methods or gear due to a lawsuit threat. Anglers in comparison are faced with constantly changing seasons, bag and size limits. It is clear that in all plans our allocations were based on a recent time period when there were few fish available for anglers to catch, due to commercial overfishing. Now all angler FMP allocations are too low for reasonable management choices. We face tougher rules every year for a growing list of managed species despite the recovering stocks. Talk about finding the Grinch had visited before Christmas!

'Tis the season to be jolly?

Despite all of the above, Anglers have a lot to be thankful for? Many overfished species are rebounding. Fish we last saw in numbers and quality while fishing with our fathers are returning.

The biggest surprise was black sea bass. Big sea bass were present in good numbers for the first time in years. Where were these 5 and 6-year-old fish hiding is a major question mark? The important part is they were there in quantity. Will they return in 2001?

A once great recreational fishery for porgies (scup) is rebounding. New restrictions on the offshore small mesh winter fisheries should allow more one and two year old porgies to return next spring. The northern states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York had great porgy seasons. They had more big porgies than at anytime in the last ten years. Only a few of these bigger porgies have found their way into New Jersey waters.

Weakfish were also a surprise. Big weakfish and lots of smaller weakfish came in May and stayed the summer fishing season. These saved our fishing season in most New Jersey inshore waters.

Croakers, a fish that thirty years ago was once the mainstay of both ocean and bay fishing, have returned. They thin out as they travel toward north Jersey. These fish fight hard and are great on the dinner table. What is strange is they have not entered the coastal bays like in times past.

Stripers continue to recover but catches trail estimated angler landings in most locations. Fluke continue to rebound with most New Jersey anglers reporting fewer landings than they reported in recent years. MRFSS appears to overestimate actual angler fluke landings by a good amount.

Last year was not a good bluefish year. South Jersey had them only during the spring migration run. Gill nets were evident at North Jersey angler preferred locations for most of the summer. Gillnets caught a lot of bluefish and sharply reduced local bluefish availability. Despite this regulators at Mid-Atlantic council took 3 million pounds of angler uncaught or released bluefish quota and transferred it to the commercial fishermen for 2001. They gave this key angler resource to a commercial fishery that gets little money per pound! Most observers believe that these inshore gill-netters are destroying the headboat and charterboat businesses. How this makes sense to fishery managers is beyond my ability to understand. To make matters worse, in the past when bluefish were scarce bonito, Spanish mackerel, false albacore and dolphin appeared in abundance. Now gill-netters are also targeting these species. These key species support a huge recreational inshore trolling fishery. Was last year's poor season due to an increasing commercial presence all season long?

Lastly the New Jersey inshore school bluefin tuna season was a bust. Few school fish showed and when they were present catches were tiny. A strong year growing year class from 1995 and 1996 were present in Maryland waters for a time. These fish are now in the 80-100 pound range. The traditional trolling fishery caught none of these larger tuna. Two extra 30-day bluefin tuna seasons during September and November produced few recorded landings by New Jersey anglers. 

ICCAT

The recent November international meeting in Morocco passed new ICCAT rules requiring a major reduction in the international landings of both blue and white marlins. The reduction mandated is 50% reduction from an earlier year's landing reduction of 25%. The impact of this new change on US anglers will be severe. The US delegation agreed to a total season landing cap of 250 blue and white marlin. This is surely not the reward anglers expected for their current 99% release rate. Past angler conservation achieved without international rules over the last twenty years is now punished by even tougher rules on their fishery. US Anglers landings are not the reason these fish stocks have collapsed! What sense does a 250 fish limit make?

Two positive ICCAT actions were approved. 1-the SCRS arm of ICCAT would write and present a report on the two stock mixing theory. 2- SCRS was to undertake Mid-Atlantic longline research trips to determine if there is a mid-Atlantic spawning ground for bluefin tuna.

Bluefin tuna recovery was a big loser at the meeting. Many eastern zone nations outright flaunted ICCAT's 1999 bluefin tuna quotas and restricted size regulations. Most European and North African countries avoided quota reductions by reporting sharply lower small bluefin landings. All failed to document how such large reductions in small bluefin landings were achieved. The SCRS, ICCAT's scientific arm, explanation is that these nations just decided to stop reporting honest numbers.  Without even a pretense of bluefin tuna compliance by Eastern Zone member nations, ICCAT's future as a meaningful and effective conservation organization is surely in question!

Our only remaining hope is to put strong political pressure on the New State Department Heads to insist that ICCAT member nations comply with ICCAT's rules and regulations. Only time will tell if this last option can or will work.

 If ICCAT rules and conservation is not achievable, why continue to support ICCAT? Despite tough NMFS US regulations our domestic HMS fisheries continue to decline. Consider what ICCAT numbers tell us; In 1980, before tougher US quotas, our Western zone reported 5,800 Mt landed. The Eastern or European Zone in 1980 reported 14,000 Mt.  Sixteen years later, without any Eastern Zone conservation their 1996 landings had exploded to 52,000 Mt. Our commissioners further reduced Western Zone landings to 2,500 Mt. How could Europeans increase their bluefin tuna landing by over 300% if our conservation was not supplying the fish? 

New high tech pop-off tags scientifically support the position that US, Japan and Canadian conservation has provided the tuna for the Eastern Atlantic countries to continue overfishing.  bluefin tuna are a one stock ocean wide fishery, just like all other tuna and marlin species in the Atlantic. Doesn't this make continuing 20 years of strict Western Zone unilateral tuna conservation seem dumb and stupid?

The time has come for other countries to comply with their planned ICCAT quota for tuna, marlin and swordfish. If there is no compliance then turn the job over to the UN or some other effective agency. ICCAT must be put on notice to get both members and non-members into compliance or else. Let All US fishermen agree to work hard together to put an immediate stop to supporting ICCAT management. Their management has become a farce. Twenty years is more than enough time to allow ICCAT's continued failures.

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