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As you know, I am no longer the Commissioner to the ASMFC as of June 30th, but I sat in on the August Striped Bass ASMFC Management Board Meeting. It takes a lot to get me depressed and totally upset with the system, but this meeting accomplished that. For some reason the Board has now decided to manage striped bass recreational fishing as a catch and release fishery. They no longer care about people who want to take home fish to eat. They listen to the squeakiest wheels that just want to be able to catch and release and don’t care what they do to the resource in the process. Let’s look at what happened.
In 2022, a lot of striped bass became available in the New York Bight area. The conditions were perfect. There were a lot of bunkers in close, the water temperature stayed warm and striped bass came in shore. According to the faulty recreational statistics, we had a great season. We can’t win this game. When we had three bad years in a row, everyone was saying that the fishery needed to be protected since the catch was going down. So the ASMFC reduced us to one fish. Then when the catch was still low the ASMFC put in a slot limit to greatly limit the recreational catch. Suddenly we have a good year when the conditions are perfect, and we are told that we are catching too many fish. An emergency action was put in place with no public hearing before the Spring meeting. Most of ASMFC Commissioners, like me, found out just before the meeting that the plan was to implement a ridiculous slot. Since the state directors hear most often from people who do not want to take fish home to eat but only want to catch and release large numbers of fish, ASMFC implemented a 3-inch slot limit. This action will only raise the catch and release mortality. It will also encourage anglers to poach. When recreational anglers lose confidence in managers, they begin to ignore the regulations. Anglers monitored themselves when they had confidence that the measures were reasonable and would result in long-term gains in the fishery. In the last 15 years, we have proved to anglers that increasing stocks do not result in a better fishery. They are told to keep fewer fish when the fishery is in trouble and to keep fewer fish when the fishery is doing just fine. They also know the biggest mortality for striped bass in recent years has come from the catch and release fishery. The subsistence fishermen do not make their views heard at hearings and meetings. You must have a thick skin these days to say you should be allowed to take home a striped bass to eat. When you say that, you get crucified by the internet bullies. We have reached the point where there seems to be no compromise and we have stopped listening to one another.
There are some states that have learned to play the game to maximize the gains for their state’s fishing public. A perfect example is Massachusetts. For more than 10 years, they have been pushing management rules that greatly reduce what a recreational angler can take home. They have sold this to their catch and release fishermen as a way to protect the resource. But they are actually protecting their hook and line commercial striped bass fishery. If they were so concerned about the resource and protecting the 2015 striped bass year class, why did they put in place and maintain a 34-inch minimum size for the commercial fishery? They are allowing over a million pounds of big spawning fish to be harvested when they are greatly reducing the recreational harvest on these same fish. They oppose any measure that would reduce catch and release mortality by creating seasons. The catch and release anglers don’t seem to care about the Massachusetts hook and line commercial fishery as long as they can continue to catch and release throughout the year. Massachusetts is not alone in their support for commercial interests over recreational ones. Remember when the numbers were high and there were more striped bass available, some New York interests opposed allowing anglers to harvest 2 striped bass a day. They succeeded in keeping a one fish bag limit when all other states were allowing two. Their selfish attitude robbed recreational anglers and subsistence fishermen an opportunity to catch more striped bass. The Chesapeak Bay states go along with Massachusetts as long as they get to keep the commercial and recreational smaller size limit in the bay.
This infighting in the recreational community has made us very weak. The recreational community no longer works together. They don’t speak with a unified voice allowing managers to pick and choose whose voice to listen to. The managers say they listen to the recreational community but that is only a small percentage of the larger recreational community. The managers listen to paid lobbyists who receive some of their income from environmental groups and charter boat captains who focus only on catch and release fishing. They don’t reach out to anglers who don’t belong to these organized groups. They ignore the anglers who want to take a fish home to eat. These anglers don’t speak at public meetings because it opens them up to attacks. Every time I defend subsistence fishermen, I get attacked. I get attacked when I support environmental justice fisheries issues. Again, my roots are in Brooklyn where we fished from docks and piers and fish were never wasted. They fed our families with what we caught. When we worked together in the early 90’s, we got things accomplished. We got striped bass gamefish in New Jersey with bills introduced in other states to do the same. ASA and the Fisherman Magazine would sponsor workshops that JCAA would organize to bring all the recreational groups from up and down the coast together to work on fisheries issues, like striped bass gamefish, tuna and shark issues. This no longer happens.
The only Commissioner who spoke for the recreational community and the people who wanted to take home a fish to eat at the August meeting was Adam Nowalsky. Adam kept pointing out that any plans need to consider all recreational anglers and to address the catch and release mortality. It amazed me that I did not hear another voice, not even from New Jersey, fighting for these recreational anglers. I did make my comment as a member of the public. I was thanked and then ignored.
One solution, in looking at striped bass, is to consider the warmer water in Chesapeake Bay and the pollution there. We should consider what other rivers are contributing to the coastal migratory stock. We need to do this so we can honestly manage the new producing areas for the benefit of everyone. Remember, when we made the management plan, we assumed that the Chesapeake Bay produced 75% - 85% of the coastal migratory stock. It is now estimated that Hudson and Delaware Rivers contribute 40% of the coastal migratory stocks. We also allowed Chesapeake Bay a harvest of 25% of the stock inside the bay. This needs to be revisited. This can happen in the new addendum or amendment by reinstating the Delaware and Hudson as producing areas and managing them in that way.
Where are we now? ASMFC has extended the emergency action until the October meeting. If they have public hearings and you care about striped bass management, you need to make your voice heard. If you are interested in working with the JCAA Striped Bass Committee representing your club, contact me.
In the 80’s we saw the collapse of many stocks and wanted to create regulations that would rebuild those stocks. We blamed overfishing for this problem. The Council and the Commission worked to create management plans that would tackle this overfishing. We knew we had to design a better method of tallying the recreational catch. The system in place was not working and we really had no idea what the actual numbers were. We put some commercial quotas in place, put a mesh size in place and created some gear restrictions. We established seasons to give more protection to some species. We were promised if we suffered the pain with the stricter regulations, there would be a reward in the future. We were assured there would be longer seasons and increased bag limits. There was some success in some stocks because of the restrictions. But some stocks never rebuilt or once they started rebuilding saw a second collapse. With an almost total moratorium on weakfish and winter flounder, we saw no progress in rebuilding the stocks. On stocks that did show some progress, we did not see any of the rewards. The reference points were set so high there was no way to reach the established goals. We also went to Congress during the last reauthorization of the Magnusson/Stevens Act in 2006 and demanded better recreational data collection. We have been using the new system for a number of years but it was doomed to fail. Dr. John Borman, when he was put in charge of improving the existing system, testified before Congress in 2007 that we needed to increase the funding for recreational statistics from the existing 18 million a year to 50 million dollars. It is now 2023, we are still budgeted for $18 million with no evidence that Congress will increase that amount any time soon. This results in no change in the actual data collection but just tinkering with the models using the poor data that is available. Everyone who ever took a computer class knows, “Garbage In, Garbage Out!” Congress needs to step up and actually fund quality data collection. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to get commercial statistics throughout the country but only $18 million spent on the recreational side.
The other problem is fisheries managers can only manage anglers and fishermen. That means the only tool in the toolbox is changing what the commercial and recreational industries can harvest. The models are based on results you get when you only manage the anglers. There are no other criteria that are under their control. That means that climate change cannot be considered as an element in any management plan. There is a movement by NOAA, NMFS and ASMFC to look at climate resiliency in fisheries. I have sat through many presentations on this issue but I realize how little control we have and how few tools we can bring to bear.
I will post on the JCAA website and email to anyone who requests it, a study that was done in the early 50’s to look at saltwater recreational fishing. I asked George Howard why the money was spent to complete this type of study. He told me the Division of Fish and Wildlife at that time was in the Division of Commerce. The Director of Fish and Wildlife recognized the economic power of saltwater recreational fishing and acknowledged it would have more impact than freshwater fishing, hunting or commercial fishing. He knew a baseline would be important. The study was written in 1955. It is one of the most comprehensive recreational saltwater studies that I have ever seen. It looked at party boats, charter boats, private boats, jetty fishing, surf fishing and rowboat liveries. It also broke down the economics of what it actually cost to go fishing. After reading this study a number of times, I had an epiphany. In this study there is information on what stocks were most important to every segment of the recreational fishery. There are no bar graphs, just pie charts. It shows the percentage of each stock for each segment of the industry. I realized that many of the species we were trying to protect from overfishing in the 80’s, were disappearing not just from overfishing but from a change in water temperature. Jonathan Reuben, the lobbyist for Lunds in the 80’s, and I were going to the MidAtlantic Fisheries Management Council and complaining about the disappearance of inshore mackerel stocks. This change was impacting the party and charter boats and the inshore commercial fishermen. Our concerns fell on deaf ears. We thought it was from overfishing but it is clear now that was the start of the impact of warming of the oceans. That is the same time we began to have concerns about lobsters. Their stocks increased as the water warmed slightly but then crashed when it reached certain higher temperature. Recruitment stopped. When you look at the charts, you can compare the stocks from the fisheries in the 50’s to what we saw in the 80’s and what we see now. We got caught napping because we were looking at the wrong elements as we tried to understand the changing fish populations.
The consequence is the managers promised both the commercial and recreational communities that if they followed the regulations, there would once again be abundant stocks. We were blindsided by the impact of climate change and set goals we could not accomplish. After looking at all this data, I have concluded that we are having dramatic impacts on the bays and estuaries as they warm faster than the ocean. Add pollution into the mix along with endocrine disruptors which impact on the reproduction of fish, and you have the perfect storm. We need to begin planning with these issues in mind and implement management plans in a realistic fashion. ASMFC, to its credit, recognized this in managing lobsters and did not put in a total moratorium in the Southern New England region. If NMFS had been in charge, the entire fishery would have been shut down putting many out of business with no impact on the long term stocks. We were also honest and told them there was nothing to be done to fix the stocks and they can simply continue fishing as long as it is economically feasible.
Because we weren’t considering the impact of climate change in creating regulations, we have promised things we could not deliver. All these regulations do is cause more pain in the industry. NMFS management does not allow the flexibility we will need as we continue to deal with climate change. Even when a stock is above the target, there is no flexibility to allow an increased catch. The perfect examples are summer flounder, black sea bass and scup. We have lost the trust of the recreational community. There is no trust in the regulations.
Anglers look at the results that they got when they rebuilt the stocks of summer flounder, scup and black sea bass and see no benefit. In fact, all they see are more penalties. This encourages anglers to ignore the regulations and turn into poachers. Unlike 20 years ago when we would police our own, there is no common understanding in the recreational community of how people should behave and what rules they should follow.