Law for EEZ fishing near Block Island
Thought this was interesting
Another Chance To Fix A Striper No-Take Zone
Feb 2, 2016 9:31 AM
By Michael Wright
Now it's Lee Zeldin's turn to try to undo a wrinkle in federal law that bars Montauk and Rhode Island fishermen from catching striped bass in portions of Block Island Sound.U.S. Representative Zeldin introduced a bill to the House this week that would lift the prohibition on fishing for striped bass in federal waters just in the areas between Block Island and Montauk or Rhode Island that happen to lie more than three miles from land. It's a mirror of a bill brought to the House twice by his predecessor, Tim Bishop, but which never came up for a vote. Hopefully Mr. Zeldin's affiliation with the majority party will grease the skids for the law, which is certainly of little consequence to most lawmakers.
The law just seems to make sense and it would be a big relief to a lot of Montauk fishermen, especially those running party boats.
The gist of the situation is that striped bass are protected from harvest in federal waters, which start three miles offshore of each state's coastline. The moratorium goes back to the early days of striped bass management and the desire to protect the fish when they are amassed on their offshore over-wintering grounds off the coast of Delaware and Maryland, waiting to make their springtime run up into the freshwater rivers where they spawn.
It is a good rule.
The hitch comes where the general straight coastline the boilerplate law accounted for has a hiccup: Long Island and Block Island. In a technical sense, where Block Island Sound and Long Island Sound carve into the gap between Long Island and southern New England creates a gray area of inshore waters that happens to be more than three miles from land and, therefore, federal waters off-limits to striped bass fishermen. Some staunch conservationists disagree, but I and a lot of other fishermen believe that this no-striper zone is not what was intended by the federal ban on striped bass harvests.
The no-striper zone has left a lot of Montauk and Rhode Island fishermen in a quandary in the depths of summer. After the stripers make their spring run up the coast and settle into their summer haunts in Tri-State and New England waters, they tend to gradually slide into deeper and deeper waters as temperatures climb.
In most years (not this past summer, ironically), by early August, the rips in the shadow of the Montauk Lighthouse are devoid of their most famous denizens. When this happens, striper fishermen have long shifted to the deep, cold waters flowing over rips near the Sub Buoy and the North Rips of Block Island, where the bass have gone to stay cool. It's not a practice that is particularly surreptitious. On calm August nights there will be dozens of boats drifting these deep-water stretches.
The problem is that those waters are federal territory and, on occasion, federal fisheries enforcement agents decide to remind fishermen of that with a big fat tickets. Party boat captains, whose brightly lit boats are easy to spot twinkling even on the distant horizon, where smaller boats are invisible, are the most common targets of this intermittent enforcement - though midnight raids at the North Rips a couple years ago snagged several private boats also.
So our federal representatives have tried to change the law, to no avail thus far. Mr. Zeldin has his bill scheduled for a committee discussion, the second step in the process, soon. I and others will be hoping he will get the ball across the goal line.
http://www.27east.com/news/article.c...r-No-Take-Zone
