captains charters and customers what are they saying

[basshunter]

I cannot stand by and let folks post the mis-information about how healthy the SB fishery is right now....because there is always a good chance others will believe them.....

It's time for some reality and real facts to enter these discussions....
To me, that's more important than whether someone "likes" me, or not.....
Overall, I feel we are probably headed for some sort of short or abbreviated moratorium....with the ASMFC probably not acting until 2015, it may be too late by then......

**The striped bass spawning biomass (SSB) is now 1 Million lbs from the ASMFC being forced to declare that overfishing is occurring.......I'm going to try the best I can to continue raising awareness of this, whether some folks are happy with that....or not.......
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darkskys how can you possibly correct them when there are so many? by the way I applaud your efforts though I am not sure how many will listen. Keep up thegood work. the misinformation you are talking about goes on every day. Some examples:

the government says its fine.... the ocean never saw so many bass..... WHATS THE PROBLEM !!!

The stocks of striped bass dramatically improved when the Gov stopped the commercial fishing for them. Its not the rod and reel recreational guys that decimate them. I see just as good if not better striper fishing right now than I did 10 years ago. These fish are in no way endangered in NJ..... Maybe we should kill more stripers since its a common theory that stripers are feeding on weakfish and making their stocks lower than years past.

these guys just don't get it. The commerical industry is what will kill this fishery not the recreational guys. I have been fishing these waters since the 70's and have seen highs and lows and right now we are on a high and I may not know everything but I can tell 100% it will not deplete the striped bass stocks by keeping a couple bass! These guys need to get a life or go hug a tree!

[DarkSkies]

darkskys how can you possibly correct them when there are so many? by the way I applaud your efforts though I am not sure how many will listen. Keep up thegood work. the misinformation you are talking about goes on every day. Some examples:

Basshunter sorry for the delay in responding. I have been trying to get a lot of projects done I haven't been able to do in a while, and busy with other committments.
I thank you for taking the time to C&P the comments. I am not familiar with the context of the conversation they came from so I don't want to judge the folks who made the comments.

Rather than address them all, it seems there are several mis-interpretations evident here......I'll try to address them one by one....and hopefully this way, folks reading will not see this as criticism of others, but some broad based observations I have come to see, about when and why folks can easily mis-interpret what they see out there.........


1. The commercial industry will kill this fishery.
This is a common statement, repeated over and over throughout the internet.



What are some of the reasons folks have this interpretation?

A. They see videos of commercial bycatch, dead striped bass, laying by the thousands on the ocean surface after gillnetters have thrown them back dead.

B. They see videos of commercial beach netting operations off of Hatteras, which is a limited and specific fishery every year....

C. nonetheless, these types of videos induce horror and anger among fishermen as they come to believe that this is what is causing the real problems when bass fishing seems to decline in an area.

**We react to these videos, IMO, because they naturally provoke an emotional response.....no one likes to see dead bass floating on the water, a complete waste of the resource....

D. Poaching/Overlimit catches of striped bass by Commercial netters.....
It's no secret commercial netters are involved in many illegal poaching operations every year....a Google search will reveal dozens of prosecutions of watermen from VA to RI, being caught with bass they are not allowed to have.

This also will produce an emotional reaction, causing some of us to think that the commercials are killing thousands of unpermitted bass....and they are......

Is that where the biggest numbers of dead bass comes from?







**The Sum Total....of the harvest, illegal and legal, by the Commercials, is less than what we are now taking from the Recreational side...
If (and when) another moratorium is declared, fault will rest squarely on the shoulders of us, the Recreational fishermen.