The Straight Dope on Striped Bass

posted in:

August 7, 2013

McMurray large — Captain John McMurray with a large striped bass

Forget about slot limits and gamefish… address fishing mortality!

Having served on the ASMFC Striped Bass Advisory Panel for 6 years (not to mention having pretty much built a business on striped bass) I read Lou Tabory’s recent Striper Report 2013 piece in Fly Fishing in Saltwaters Magazine with interest. I have great respect for Tabory. He was a pioneer. His piece provides an interesting historical, albeit anecdotal, perspective on striped bass from the point of view of someone that has fished for them hard over the course of three decades. Yet, I’d have to say that it reflects a general misunderstand most anglers have on the issue.

I’m guessing very few readers of this column would disagree that stripers appear to be headed for trouble. Sure there are still fish around. In fact I’ve had some epic days in the last few years. I’ve seen more 40’s and 50’s in the space of a few days than I’ve seen in my entire life. But it generally lasts no more than a few days as bodies of large fish move through. Gone are the days of consistent schoolie action, with the occasional large fish, which I built a business on. The new pattern seems to be that I’m on them for a few days, then there’s a precipitous lack of fish, sometimes for long stretches. Years ago, getting skunked was rare for me. I can’t say that’s the case anymore. I’m certainly not alone in such observations.

When you look at the recent science this sort of thing makes sense really. Each year, young-of-the year seine surveys are taken in various spots in the Chesapeake Bay. Given the bulk of the striped bass resource is produced in the Chesapeake watershed it’s a pretty good indicator of what we can expect to see in the fishery moving forward. During the last 8 years such surveys have shown average to well-below average young-of-the-year numbers, with the anomalous exception of 2011 which was quite good. This trend is much different from the prior decade where we had several banner year classes. All of this coincides with what guys like me are seeing on the water. Good, albeit very limited runs of larger older striped bass – those fish that are generally older than 9 or 10 years. As these fish grow older we continue to hammer on them while they become larger, yet few and fewer, and there isn’t much behind them.

Why are we having these poor young-of-the-year indices? There is some pretty good science out there suggesting it’s climate-related. NOAA scientists have documented what they’re calling an “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” (AMO), a combination of wind and ocean currents in the North Atlantic that seems to change every 35 years or so. When such a shift happens, it affects local weather along the Atlantic Coast, providing deliberate temperature and precipitation shifts, and subsequently river flow and salinity changes. During a warm phase springtime along the East Coast tends to be wet and cool — more rain, more water, and more food for just-hatched stripers. And during such trends we’ve had good young of the year indices, and subsequently striper numbers go up. Then, 35 years or so later the AMO flips and we have drier springs, less rain, less food. After a lag, striper numbers start to decline. This appears to be where we’re at right now. And guess what… A prior AMO flip coincided with the poor young-of-the-year indices that contributed to the striper crash in the 1980s. When that cycle ended, stripers recovered, not just because of the moratorium, but likely because conditions for their success became more favorable.

So yes, there are likely natural factors at work here, which managers of course have no control over. But… they do have control over fishing mortality, and regardless of the cause, given the decline both anecdotally and on paper, they should be reducing mortality! Just about everyone and their mothers are asking them to do something! But they aren’t… Because technically, striped bass are not overfished, and overfishing isn’t occurring.

Striped bass are managed by fishing mortality and spawning stock biomass thresholds for management action. These are parameters that ASMFC scientists have put on the stock, that if exceeded, trigger corrective action such as reducing fishing mortality. Thus far, fishing mortality has remained below the threshold and spawning stock biomass above it. ASMFC is generally not compelled to take action until such thresholds have been crossed. It is, in fact, very rare the ASMFC would take management action unless the science indicated it was necessary. In this case it hasn’t.

While certainly Commissioners hear from their constituents, it’s difficult for a lot of them to comprehend there’s a real problem with striped bass when a.) A number of the fish they manage are technically overfished, and/or overfishing is occurring (e.g. winter flounder, weakfish, tautog etc.), b.) There are still pockets of very good stripe bass fishing even as the stock contract, and c.) Most Commissioners simply don’t spend the time on the water that we do. Believe it or not, there are still those managers who frequently say stupid things like “striped bass are eating everything” when discussing species they have failed to properly manage like winter flounder, or river herring. Such assertions are ridiculous give the historical abundance of such species side-by-side in the same environment.

But I’m getting into too much detail here. Given the abundant evidence of a decline and the importance of the striped bass stock to the recreational fishing industry, a good case for precautionary action can certainly have been made. Unfortunately, despite the clear fact that the majority of stakeholders wanted to see a reduction in fishing mortality, ASMFC punted with Addendum 3 (their 2011 chance to reduce fishing mortality), and we’ll now have to wait for the results of the 2012 benchmark, which is being peer-reviewed right now, and 2014 (if we’re lucky) for new regulations, assuming ASMFC wises up and opts to reduce fishing mortality.

And simply reducing fishing mortality is all we need ASMFC to do! Yet the point of this blog is that the fishing public (even well respected guys like Tabory) seem to keep talking about things like slot-limits (a fish in-between a certain size limit) and game fish status (making the species recreational only) as if these two things are the antidote to the striped bass decline. They aren’t!

A striped bass coastal slot limit, unless it’s crafted in a way that distributes mortality (which is actually very hard to do), is unwise. For one, such slot limits tend to place a lot of pressure on very specific year classes. By implementing a slot limit we’d run the risk of severely depleting a weak year class that happens to fall within a slot limit’s bounds. Given the average to well-below-average young-of-the-year indices during the last 8 years (with the exception of 2011) one can see how a coastal slot limit may be problematic in the striped bass fishery.

Because smaller fish (e.g. 24 to 28”) are generally easier for the fishing public to catch, fishing mortality would go through the roof. In other words, a lot more fish are killed with such a slot than if the size limit had remained at 28” (or in a perfect world 36”), and a lot more are killed before they have had a chance to spawn! Allowing a fish to spawn at least once before it’s killed is fisheries management 101, and that’s essentially what a 28” size-limit seeks to do. With a species like striped bass, the key to effective management is allowing enough older, larger and more fecund fish, representing a number of age classes, to survive, in order to assure that there is adequate spawning stock in reserve to make up for the poor or missing year classes. That is best done by reducing mortality, not by imposing a slot limit.

The answer to the striped bass problem isn’t a slot limit, it’s actually much simpler. Managers just need to reduce fishing mortality. Whether that’s done with a higher size limit, smaller bag limit, or a shorter seasons is irrelevant. But you generally can’t reduce fishing mortality using slot limits.

Now let’s talk about the popular “gamefish” fix, which a lot of people mistakenly think is the magic bullet. Yes it’s easy to point the finger at commercial fishermen. I’m the first one to admit that it’s incredibly irritating when the boat next to you is bailing fish he intends to sell, either legally or illegally. But assuming the problem is fishing mortality anglers are definitely the largest perpetrators. The commercial fishery is controlled through quotas, so commercial fishermen cannot go over the “harvest cap” set by the state (at least not legally). The recreational fishery, on the other hand, is managed through bag and size limits. The growing popularity of fishing for stripers and the lack of any sort of recreational harvest cap has allowed a large increase in recreational mortality over the years while commercial mortality has remained virtually static. In 2006, the year the recreational striper fishery peaked, recreational dead discards alone (those fish that didn’t survive the release) were around double the total commercial catch. Pretty startling right?

I’m not saying commercial fishermen are not part of the problem. They certainly are. It was hard to miss all the photos and videos of acres of dead discards from North Carolina trawlers a couple of years ago. Equally disturbing were the tens of thousands of pounds of dead stripers caught in illegal gill-nets found in Chesapeake tributaries. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discards and poaching. But let’s be honest. Such dead fish, while an inexcusable waste of the resource, still pale in comparison to recreational mortality. Couple this with the fact that some coastal states who were able to get gamefish status after the last crash ended up giving their commercial quota to anglers, and it’s hard to argue for game-fish with a straight face. Until we get recreational mortality under control, “wealthy anglers taking fish away from hard-working commercial fishermen” doesn’t play well with decision-makers. “Gamefish” is empowering, and of course I support the theory, but these are the realities of the situation.

Assuming striped bass continue to decline, there is a rationale for gamefish, but thus far the angling community hasn’t picked up on it. I don’t really have the space to fully explain this here but will certainly do so in a future blog (perhaps the next one if nothing pressing comes up). Regardless, the reality is that gamefish is politically very difficult right now, and in my mind a nonstarter.

If the recreational fishing community continues to perpetuate the myth that it’s commercial fishing that’s causing the decline or, that a slot limit is the answer, it will just strengthen the idea that many, if not most, Commissioners harbor– that the recreational community doesn’t really get it. And so, they can just disregard us. I’ve had personal conversations with such Commissioners who have told me, in so many words, that this is the case. This is essentially what’s been happening over the last several years as Commissioners fail to listen to constituent pleas for precautionary management action.

We need be clear on what we, as a community of stakeholders, want. A reduction in fishing mortality. So that we can enjoy the abundance of fish we had just five years ago and so recreational fishing business can continue to thrive and so that anglers can continue to enjoy a rebuilt, abundant fishery. I don’t see any reason for a two-fish coastal limit. And really, the size limit should probably be higher. But how it gets done doesn’t really matter to me, and it shouldn’t to you. Reduce fishing mortality! That’s what our message should be!

At this point, whether ASMFC does reduce fishing mortality is really contingent on what the 2012 benchmark stock assessment reveals, and of course how much noise those of us who fish for this amazing animal (and those of who depend on this fishery make a living) make.

The 2012 assessment is currently being peer-reviewed, yet I suspect it will be released very soon. I will let readers know what it says just as soon as we have it. Stay tuned!

About Captain John McMurray

After obtaining an undergraduate degree in Political Science from Loyola College in Maryland, Captain John McMurray served in the US Coast Guard for four years as a small-boat coxswain and marine-fisheries law enforcement officer. He was then recruited to become the first Executive Director of the Coastal Conservation Association New York. He is currently the Director of Grants Programs at the Norcross Wildlife Foundation in New York. He is the owner and primary operator of “One More Cast” Charters. John is a well known and well published outdoor writer, specializing in fisheries conservation issues. In 2006 John was awarded the Coastal Conservation Association New York Friend of Fisheries Conservation Award.

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by: Rip Cunningham

posted in:

August 6, 2013

Knock Them Down

A couple of weeks ago I had to go to Washington, DC to testify in a Senate Hearing on the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which is the federal law that governs fisheries in our Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) or from 3 to 200 miles. While I don’t mind the process, and it is a process, of having to testify, I hate going to DC in the summer. I really hate it when I have to miss an event right in my back yard that I want to attend.

That event was the breaching of the Veazie Dam on the Penobscot River just upstream from Bangor, ME. A lot of folks would think that this event only benefits Atlantic salmon and has little to do with many of the other fish that we like to catch. Wrong! This was an historic event that opened up one of the biggest rivers in the New England area that has been essentially closed to fish passage for over 150 years. Yes, it will benefit the Atlantic salmon, but it will do much more. It is one more step in an effort to restore the greater Gulf of Maine ecosystem.


Photo courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.

This dam removal was the culmination of 15 years of concerted effort by a very diverse group pulled together by a common thread. The Atlantic Salmon Federation, American Rivers, Maine Audubon, Natural Resources Council of Maine, The Nature Conservancy, Trout Unlimited and the Penobscot Indian Nation all worked together to raise $62 million to begin a new chapter in the rivers restoration. One of the most encouraging aspects of this event is that many of those who worked to get this project done were fighting each other back in the 1990’s over the relicensing of this and other dams. So it was a complete turnaround from fighting each other to trusting each other and working together for a common cause. This is fantastic stuff.

Once the dam is fully removed, it will open up almost a thousand miles of river to a variety of species. Yes, it will benefit Atlantic salmon, but there are a number of species that are important to the overall ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine, such as river herring, shad and rainbow smelt. It will also benefit striped bass, Atlantic sturgeon and tomcod. River herring are an important component of the forage base and could help with the restoration of Eastern Main cod populations. The salmon numbers over the past three years have ranged from 374 (2013) to over 3000 (2011). It is thought that about 2,000 Atlantic salmon have passed over the dam and predictions are that this could rise to an annual run of 20,000. The annual run of river herring could increase a thousand fold and reach a run of 2 million fish.

Hopefully, we are realizing that free flowing rivers are important to the health of our marine ecosystems and hopefully we are not too late. As fish populations move North and East, this will likely be the southern-most range of the Atlantic salmon in North America, but it can and will be an important part of the life cycle to countless other fish. It is proof positive that we can accomplish substantial goals when we work collectively. And, yes, it seems counter intuitive to be eliminating clean energy, but the reality is that this dam produced very little and is easily replaced. As part of the Veazie Dam project, Black Bear Hydro Partners is completing improvements at six dams that means hydropower production will be maintained and likely increased with support of the project partners.

by: Steve Waters

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August 5, 2013

Obstacles Facing Florida’s Anglers

Saltwater fishing in Florida is surprisingly good in spite of all of the obstacles anglers face.

Bureaucrats at all levels of government do their best to make things tough for fishermen. From increased fees for citizens to launch their boats at public ramps, regulations that are either too restrictive or too lax, and to environmental issues that are overblown or ignored.

I’ve been covering the outdoors in South Florida for more than 20 years for the Sun Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale. Some fishing has improved dramatically since I arrived from upstate New York, while fishing for other species has suffered.

One constant during that time: recreational anglers rarely get any credit for the good stuff, but they almost always get the blame for the bad stuff.

For example, the quality of South Florida’s coral reefs has declined, in large part due to pollution and poor water quality. Yet recreational anglers and scuba divers get almost all the blame from agencies and groups that are in favor of marine protected areas, or MPAs, which would keep people out. There is no talk of having Florida’s water management districts limit the amount of polluted freshwater they let loose during and after heavy rainstorms and hurricanes. Much of that water in South Florida goes out to inlets, which hurts reefs and everything that depends on them.

An even worse situation is currently taking place in Stuart, where two of the best inshore fisheries in the state, the St. Lucie River and the Indian River, have been plagued by nasty freshwater being released from Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie.

Before a dike was built around the lake, and what used to be the northern Everglades was converted into farmland, when the lake got high, the water overflowed and gently seeped to the south.

Now when the water gets high in Lake Okeechobee – much of it coming from Orlando after a rain event and flowing south through the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes and the Kissimmee River into the northern end of the lake – the South Florida Water Management District sends it southeast to Stuart and southwest down the Caloosahatchee River to Fort Myers rather than letting it flow south and impacting sugar cane and vegetable growers.

The dirty water has negatively impacted seagrass, fish and fishing, yet the state allows it to continue, essentially saying that it has no other choice.

Poor water quality that affects coral, sea grass and fish populations also is an issue in Biscayne Bay and Florida Bay, parts of which are in national parks and under federal jurisdiction. The feds’ reponse? Limit boaters and anglers.

Then there is the problem of lionfish. Some of these aquarium fish were dumped in the ocean off South Florida in the mid-1980s. Now the invasive fish, which are native to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, are everywhere: on reefs, in the Atlantic Ocean as deep as 1,000 feet, the Loxahatchee River, Indian River, and Florida Bay.

Lionfish eat the young of important native species such as snappers and hogfish and have no predators. Divers have been taking it upon themselves to kill as many lionfish as they can while fisheries managers contemplate what to do. Unless they take decisive action, lionfish will eventually decimate recreational fish species in Florida.

About Steve Waters

Steve Waters has been the outdoors writer for the Sun Sentinel since August of 1990. He got his start in journalism in Charleston, S.C., where he was a sportswriter and covered sailing. In his spare time, he fished for striped bass on the famed Santee-Cooper lakes with one of the high school football coaches he knew and later bought a bass boat so he could fish there on his own. When his sports editor at his next paper, The Tuscaloosa News, found out he had a boat, he asked him if he wanted to cover the outdoors in addition to covering the Crimson Tide. It wasn’t long before Waters realized that writing about fishing was way more fun than covering Alabama football. He went on to cover the outdoors for two more newspapers and a TV station, as well as sports ranging from golf and baseball to NASCAR and the NHL, before writing full-time about fishing, boating, sailing, diving, hunting, powerboat racing and environmental issues for the Sun Sentinel.

by: Peter Hamma

posted in:

August 2, 2013

Happy Friday

by: John McMurray

posted in:

August 1, 2013

This is What Rebuilt Fisheries Look Like

The Magnuson-Stevens Act is working, let’s not mess it up.

I’m Captain John McMurray and this is my blog. I’ll be posting here once a week, save for those “emergency” circumstances where I’m on the water so much I just can’t get it done. In those situations there may be a guest blogger. In short, expect new content here once a week, starting now.

For context, more about me: I’ve run a successful light-tackle fishing charter operation for well over a decade, employing three boats and three captains. I sit on the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council, one of eight regional fishery management councils in the United States, as well as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) Striped Bass Advisory Panel. I’m also the Director of Grant Programs at the Norcross Wildlife Foundation, which has distributed over 30 million in equipment grants, much of that used by organizations focused exclusively on fisheries and marine habitat protection.

In this week’s blog, however, I’m writing mostly from the viewpoint of a charter boat captain, small business owner, and perhaps most importantly, a father.

From the business side, being a charter boat captain may seem like a dream, but it’s actually very difficult and quite stressful. I know what you’re thinking: “poor guy, he has to fish all the time” yet in this business, there are long hours (not just running trips but maintaining boats); early mornings and little time for sleep; demanding clients who are paying what seems like a lot of money to catch fish; and daunting overhead expenses – the kind that keep you awake at night. Add to this the fact that at in my region fishing is seasonal, so most Captains, like me, have at least one other job they have to attend to. Without a doubt, however, the most nerve-wracking aspect of this business is the dependence on a host of completely uncontrollable variables, such as weather, water temp, clarity, bait concentrations, salinity, chlorophyll levels, etc. But… nothing is more important to a sustainable business model than an abundance of fish to catch. Without such an abundance of fish, other variables matter little.

With that in mind, in this blog I’ll focus on summer flounder (aka fluke). I’m having a banner fluke year. There have been good numbers of large fish around since early May. Summer flounder is actually one of several Mid Atlantic fish populations that are currently at or near historic high levels. Yet several years ago they were so depleted I didn’t even bother with them. Let’s take a brief look at the history to see what happened.

In 1996, Congress enacted the Sustainable Fisheries Act which with limited exceptions, set a ten-year deadline for rebuilding overfished stocks. Summer flounder was badly overfished. So, the Mid-Atlantic Council amended the summer flounder management plan to meet the new requirements, but it tried to balance rebuilding with the economic impacts on fishermen, and political pressure inevitably put too much emphasis on the latter. As a result, when the 1999 quota was set, it only had an 18% chance of success. The Natural Resource Defense Council (an NYC based environmental group) sued, demanding that the rebuilding plan have a reasonable chance of successfully meeting the 10-year rebuilding deadline. In 2000, that suit ended with a landmark decision that required management plans to have no less than a 50% chance of ending overfishing and rebuilding a stock within the established deadline.

Congress, with what appeared to be overwhelming support from the American people, reaffirmed the need to rebuild overfished stocks promptly when it reauthorized the Magnuson-Stevens Act in 2006, upholding the timeframe first enacted in the Sustainable Fisheries Act. Revised language in the reauthorization explicitly directed fishery management councils to heed the advice of independent scientists on their science and statistical committees regarding the maximum harvest levels which will permit managers to rebuild fisheries on schedule, thus somewhat isolating the Council from political pressure to allow overfishing.

The Mid-Atlantic Council adhered to the new mandates and made a determined effort to rebuild overfished stocks. As a result, it is now the only regional fishery management council where, to the best of its knowledge, no stock is overfished, none are subject to overfishing and just one (the tilefish) remains in the rebuilding stage.

Without-a-doubt, I’ve benefited from the Mid-Atlantic Council’s actions. On the water, I see more fluke than I have ever seen in my 13 years as a Captain, or my 25 years as a saltwater angler. This is one fishery where I don’t have to stress about abundance levels. I wish I could say that about striped bass! (Note: will cover this in a future blog)

As I mentioned, up until the last few years I never even bothered with fluke, as the inshore fishery was composed almost exclusively of small, young fish. The large ones were few and far between, and you generally had to go out to 60 or even 90 feet of water and fish with 10 or 12oz of lead if you wanted to catch them. Today, summer flounder make up a substantial portion of my business, as 20-inch-plus fish are relatively abundant and can be caught in shallow water close to home. They are really fun to catch on light-tackle and a ¾-oz bucktail, and of course they are great eating. My clients really enjoy fluke fishing these days, and it seems to be consistently good from May to September, providing me and my clients something to target in the traditional “dog-days” of summer.

Business interests aside, I want to emphasize how important this fishery has become to my family. Early in May of this year I took my 4-year old twins out for their very first fluke trip. First drift in a spot less than 5 minutes from where we live, my son catches a 28” fluke. Second drift my daughter sticks a 24” fish. As is usually the case with 4-year-olds, attention spans ran out quickly, but only after several more large beautiful fish. I was stoked! My kids were stoked! The look of pure and utter joy on their faces were worth more than any aforementioned business interest. We now try and do such family trips at least once a week. We all look forward to them.

This is what a fishery rebuilt under the current Magnuson Stevens Act looks like, and it exists because the Mid-Atlantic Council made the hard decisions and adopted the hard caps on harvest that they recognized were essential to successfully rebuilding the stock.

Those decisions were not popular at the time that they were made. It was inevitable that there would be some economic pain associated with the summer flounder’s recovery, which was suffered not only by the commercial fishing industry, but the recreational fishing industry as well, which saw its seasons and bag limits shrink while the stocks recovered from decades of overfishing. However, the facts now demonstrate that such pain has been well rewarded.

In the Mid-Atlantic, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service, recreational fishermen caught some 2.7 million summer flounder in 1989. In 2011, after rebuilding, that number jumped to more than 21 million fish. That’s a 700 percent increase! NOAA fisheries service’s numbers show angler trips over the last decade along the Atlantic Coast up 41 percent from the 1980s. In the Mid-Atlantic alone, according to the fisheries service, that has brought in an additional $1.4 billion in economic activity and supported 18,660 jobs. On the commercial side, the success story is similar. Gross commercial revenues for summer flounder are up more than 60 percent since 2000, when the rebuilding plan was put in place. And, in total, all of the rebuilt fish stocks brought in, on average, $585 million in gross commercial revenues every year from 2008-2010.

During the rocky-road to recovery many in the fishing industry said rebuilding couldn’t be achieved — the rebuilding goals were too ambitious, the timelines were too tight, and that catch limits were too strict. But it’s precisely because of such management action that we’re once again catching those larger, older summer flounder. I take clients out on fluke trips now and know that we have a good shot at catching big fish. Perhaps more importantly, I can take my family out with a reasonable expectation of catching a few keepers and so can other Dads.

Without a doubt the Magnuson Stevens Act requirements greatly benefited the general public, even if a few business interests may have suffered a short-term decline in profits. But, as the aforementioned statistics show, even they now benefit from a fully restored stock.

The story is similar for other recreationally important fish the Mid Atlantic Council manages, such as black seabass and scup. But of course the picture is not all rosy. Some management problems remain. In the summer flounder fishery, because the size limit is considerably higher than it has historically been (undoubtedly the reason there are large fish around now), the recreational discard mortality (about 10% of the throwbacks don’t survive) is significant. This is a problem deserving of the Mid Atlantic Council’s attention, and it’s getting it. Yet, I can’t help but note that the fishery has been rebuilt despite such discards, so overfishing was clearly a much bigger problem and, in the end, something eats those fish; they all go back into the marine ecosystem. There are also serious “fairness” issues with the state-by-state allocation system that currently exists, but that is a complicated political issue deserving of full coverage in a future blog, and I do believe we are on the verge of working that one out.

In the black seabass fishery there are issues with uncertainty in the stock assessment and the way accountability measures are applied in the recreational fishery. Because of imprecise estimates that show big picture trends rather than year-by-year accuracy, accountability measures such as pound-for-pound paybacks are not practicable. But the Mid Atlantic Council is in the process of developing reasonable solutions to such problems. Such individual solutions should be created by the competent regional councils as they arise elsewhere. The changes in Magnuson some are suggesting to fix such regional problems will likely effect all fisheries, and they could have negative consequences across the board.

Regardless, summer flounder, and the other fisheries managed by the Mid Atlantic Council, provide a good example of how that Council took the right approach to management, setting hard catch limits and enforcing them, despite the political pressure brought by some narrow economic interests. They stand in stark contrast to the still-depleted fisheries managed by, for example, the New England Fishery Management Council, which relied on various input controls such as trip limits, days at sea, etc. in order to avoid setting poundage limits on landings, and so never effectively reduced harvest. Now truly painful measures are required because they failed to embrace effective measures—such as hard harvest caps – since the Sustainable Fisheries Act was enacted in 1996.

I’ve been directly affected by such failure, for while the summer flounder’s recovery has been spectacularly successful, the collapse of the winter flounder, jointly managed by the New England Council and the ASMFC, has been dismayingly sharp and complete. In 1984, New York anglers harvested nearly 7,400,000 flounder; in 2012, they harvested only 43,500. When NMFS finally realized the depth of the flounder’s distress in 2009, and closed the fishery in federal waters, ASMFC left the state seasons open. But that doesn’t really matter to me, because instead of flounder fishing in March, I keep my boat on land because there are hardly any fish around.

Unfortunately, winter flounder are only one of the species managed, in whole or in part, by ASMFC that haven’t fared very well, precisely because that management body doesn’t have to comply with Federal Magnuson-Stevens Act standards, may ignore overfishing and is not required to rebuild overfished stocks. Weakfish, which used to be a substantial portion of my spring business, provide a good example. Today they are virtually gone; the last stock assessment indicates that just 3% of the spawning stock remains, yet ASMFC refused to follow the advice of its scientists, who advised that closing the fishery was the only way that the stock might begin to recover by the year 2020.

Striped bass remains ASMFC’s only notable “success”, but the real success took place 18 years ago after things got so bad that many states imposed a moratorium on the fishery, and it was finally recovered under a management plan that protected 95% of the spawning stock. Now, while it still hasn’t reached the spawning stock biomass or fishing mortality thresholds, it is declining rapidly. ASMFC’s 2011 Stock Assessment Update states that the striped bass spawning stock biomass will fall below its threshold in 2017, which means that the stock will be overfished in four years. Despite that fact, proposals to reduce harvest and stop the decline have been deferred or rejected by ASMFC’s striped bass management board, even considering that 99% of the public wants to see some precautionary action.

The point is that ASMFC rarely, if ever, takes action to avert a crisis. Unconstrained by federal law so instrumental in recovering stocks like summer flounder, it generally waits until their managed stocks are on or beyond the threshold of disaster before they do anything. That is not the way to manage fisheries that are so important to the public and the businesses like mine that depend on them. But that’s what you get when you don’t have firm rebuilding goals, deadlines, and accountability measures.

Abandoning the conservation and management provisions of the Sustainable Fisheries Act, in favor of an ASMFC-like model, as some in the recreational fishing community are now suggesting, is a step back in time that will ultimately hurt both fish and fishermen. Firm rebuilding deadlines appear to be the only things that get managers, who are often under intense pressure from constituents to continue overfishing, to take action. As unpopular as they may be, hard quotas represent the only approach that has ever fixed things.

There are certainly improvements to the law that should be made. The most important is to create a funding source for the science needed to produce better stock assessments, as well as funding for improved data collection and monitoring of our managed fisheries. Black seabass provide a good example of such a need. Fishermen argue that there are plenty of black sea bass around and that landings can be safely increased, but given the currently available information, managers can’t prudently concur. The only way to find the real answers is to dedicate adequate financial resources.

We also need better protection of forage and guidance on “ecosystem management”. The ecological consequences of fishing – “ecosystem overfishing” – are rarely considered when catch limits are set fishery-by-fishery. We know through experience that even what is commonly referred to as “sustainable fishing,” especially of keystone predators or prey, can cause dramatic shifts in ecosystem communities. Councils need statutory guidance on developing regional Fishery Ecosystem Plans that apply basic ecosystem principles to all fishery management decisions. A new National Standard requiring that all management measures prevent ecosystem overfishing would give these comprehensive plans teeth, a change that will, in turn, trigger new federal guidelines akin to what we have done to prevent conventional overfishing

Lastly, as a recreational industry member of the Mid Atlantic Council, I would like to see statutory language that requires a periodic—every five years or so—look at the allocation between sectors to provide the greatest overall benefit to the nation, as the Regional Councils are generally uncomfortable addressing such unpopular questions on their own.

Congress is currently embarking on the arduous process of reauthorization. In fact, most this blog is taken directly from testimony I recently gave to the Senate Committee that deals with this stuff. You can find the archived testimony here. Note that my testimony begins at 1:29.

There will most certainly be efforts by some to weaken the law that has been so critical to rebuilding stocks like summer flounder. Particularly by South Atlantic and Gulf states upset by the red snapper situation. Granted I’m no expert on what’s going on down there, but given what I’ve read on the subject, the complaints sound an awful lot like the gripes we were hearing on summer flounder five or six years ago before we rebuilt. Unfortunately, it will take a lot longer to rebuild red snapper given they live a lot longer and grow slower.

Last year NOAA Fisheries announced that the end of overfishing is in sight, with annual catch limits, mandated by the 2006 reauthorization, now in place in all federally-managed fisheries. In a marine environment where overfishing has long been the rule, reaching a point where it is the exception is indeed a milestone.

As a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council I can tell you that implementation of the 2006 Magnuson-Stevens Act Reauthorization has not easy, but it is important that we stay the course. The Magnuson-Stevens Act is working, and this is important for my business, my community, and my family. The Mid-Atlantic has turned the corner and ended overfishing, and we have rebuilt depleted fish populations like summer flounder, black seabass and scup. Now is not the time to retreat from the hard work we’ve done and the progress we are seeing on the water.

As we move into the period where Congress considers reauthorization, we’ll really need support from anglers to stay the course. Despite some regional problems, which are currently being addressed on the regional level, we should not weaken the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s conservation provisions just as they stand on the threshold of success, for those measures are responsible for the turnaround in the Mid-Atlantic and around the country, and the last thing we want to do is to go back to the failed policies of the past. Yet, that’s exactly where some in the commercial and recreational fishing communities want to take us.