Bureaucrats are ruining the sport of fishing

I know some of you will read this just until I begin to explain how our fishing regulations work, and then your eyes will glaze over and you will move on to the classified ads. Please don’t do that, especially if you are a saltwater fisherman. Our sport is in jeopardy of being ruined by a bunch of bureaucrats who have never caught a saltwater fish and have only seen them in photos. They are using a set of numbers developed by a fatally flawed system known as the Marine Recreational Information Program or MRIP.

Since it is not possible to count every fish caught by recreational fishermen, the National Marine Fisheries Service developed a plan to send out people to intercept anglers at landing points along the coast. There, they interview fishermen, asking questions about what they caught, what they threw back, how many hours they fished and other such queries. Remember, these people can only interview at public locations or where they have permission. That leaves all those trailer parks that line Indian River and Rehoboth Bay untouched.

In addition to these interviews, the contractors hired to do this this work send out surveys by mail to people who have Fisherman Identification Network numbers. This is an improvement to the old system where phone calls were made only to people who lived in ZIP codes along the water.

Now, if the NMFS used this data to indicate if the fish populations were going up or down, that would be bad enough, but no, they use their figures as if they were an actual count of the number of fish recreational fishermen caught during a certain time period.

As an example, they say that Delaware charter boats caught 200 flounder during a two-month period in the summer. I can promise you the Grizzly and the Katydid caught more than that in a week, and that’s just two charter boats out of one port.

The same report had Delaware fishermen catching thousands of black sea bass from shore. I have been fishing in Delaware for 70 years, and I doubt if I have caught 20 black sea bass from shore, and none of them exceeded five inches.

So where does the horrible information from the fish counters end up? It goes to the various councils that have the responsibility of managing the resource. In our case, they are the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The MAFMC governs the water from the three-mile limit out to 200 miles, while ASMFC governs waters out to three miles.

Both agencies must abide by management plans developed long ago with rules set to trigger certain actions should the spawning stock biomass drop below a certain level, the species be overfished or overfishing be occurring. These plans have advisory councils of which I have been a member, and I am once again a member of the Summer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Advisory Council, and the Bluefish Advisory Council. Unfortunately, in this day and age, the council meetings have been virtual and my old computer was not up to the level needed to join either of the two meetings that I should have attended. Those problems have been fixed and I did submit my thoughts, but they didn’t make any change in the final outcome.

As I explained last week, when figuring out the sea bass recreational quota, which they call Total Allowable Landings, the fish counters took the bad data from the new MRIP and applied the even worse data from the old MRIP, and decided that recreational fishermen had overfished their quota and had to pay it back by giving up a 28 percent decrease in 2022. Now, if that makes no sense to you, welcome to the club.

The management plan does say that when a sector, either commercial or recreational, overfishes its quota, it does have to pay that overage back. That’s fine. Commercial fishermen have every fish they catch counted, either by weight or by number. Recreational fishermen do not have that luxury. We have to depend on the MRIP, which anyone with an IQ above their shoe size has to know is about as accurate as throwing a bowling ball at a running deer from 100 yards and expecting to have venison for dinner.

To add insult to injury, the spawning stock biomass of black sea bass is two-and-a-half times the level for safe reproduction.

Finally, there is the loss of income to charter and head boats, bait and tackle shops, motels, hotels and all the many other businesses that depend on black sea bass to make a profit. Shorter seasons, lower bag limits or greater minimum sizes will discourage fishermen from going sea bass fishing, and they will spend their money somewhere else. To be continued ...