You can fish, but there’s a catch

 01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 17, 2008

 By TOM MEADE

Journal Sports Writer Artur Sochacki, of North Providence, casts into the waters at Salty Brine Beach in Narragansett last week. Soon, saltwater fishermen in Rhode Island and Massachusetts may need a license, depending on where they fish.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

New Englanders have always considered free access to saltwater fishing to be a right.


But as early as New Year’s Day 2009, federal regulators could require everyone fishing for striped bass and other fish to have a license.


And while other states already license saltwater fishermen, Rhode Island and Massachusetts do not. The federal Fisheries Service plans to change that.
The federal fishing license would be free for the next two years, but beginning in 2011, there could be a fee — up to $25.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is calling its plan a proposal, but fishermen and government officials talk like it’s a fact.


Mike Bucko, owner of Bucko’s Tackle and Service in Fall River, says “an outright license” will hurt “the lower economic classes, the blue-collar workers, those who fish from the shore.”
Gordon Colvin, the NOAA official in charge of implementing the new program, said the Coast Guard and state law-enforcement officials would handle enforcement. But he said regulators have not yet established fines for failing to have a license.
Colvin says the government’s goal is to collect information. “With anglers, all we’re looking for is their name, address and telephone number so that we can call them and conduct telephone-based surveys,” he says.


NOAA is creating a national registry of both those who fish in federal waters outside the three-mile limit, and those who fish closer to shore for striped bass, shad, sea-run trout and salmon — fish that are born in fresh water, then go to sea, and return to fresh water to spawn.


When Congress amended the Magnuson-Stevens Act last year, legislators gave the NOAA less than two years to establish the registry. States with their own saltwater-fishing licenses may already comply with the rule.


The fishing registry program will be similar to the federal Harvest Information Program that requires migratory-bird hunters to obtain an annual “HIP” card so the federal government can keep track of what the hunters are shooting. When a hunter buys a hunting license, he provides an address, phone number and the answers to some simple questions about what was shot the previous season. The HIP card is free.
The new system, Colvin said, will give regulators direct access to anglers.


Fishing regulators are supposed to make decisions about fishing seasons, areas and limits based on sound information. When Congress rewrote the Magnuson-Stevens Act to guide regulators, lawmakers demanded that recreational fishermen provide the same kind of information that commercial fishermen do.


Because commercial fishermen must buy licenses, it’s easier to keep track of them. To keep track of what recreational fishermen are catching, the government hires pollsters to intercept anglers at marinas and fishing piers to question them about their catch. The NOAA also conducts random telephone interviews in coastal communities to question residents about fishing.
In 2011, the NOAA will start collecting a fee — probably between $15 and $25 — for its registry, and the money will go to the general treasury, Colvin said. State fishing fees go to fishing programs.


Atlantic Coast states from North Carolina through Florida, as well as all the Gulf and Pacific coast states, require a marine recreational fishing license to fish in saltwater. To meet federal requirements, and generate some additional revenue, other states are crafting saltwater fishing licenses; they include Connecticut, New York and New Hampshire.


Rhode Island has yet to address the issue, according to Stephanie Powell, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Management.
“We have talked with the feds, and have just begun to discuss this here,” she said last month. “We will be considering over the next year or so whether there is a viable alternative for the state or whether to have anglers just register with the feds. We have some time to deliberate.”


If Rhode Island opponents of the proposal plan to cite the state’s Constitution and their so called “right” to fish freely in saltwater, they won’t have much to stand on, says Dennis Nixon, a lawyer with years of experience in marine affairs and now an associate dean in the College of Environment and Life Science at the University of Rhode Island.
Nixon says the constitutional provision (section 17), while it talks about residents’ “rights” to fish and “privileges of the shore,” has been overturned several times by the state Supreme Court for more than a century.
For instance, in 1888 the court upheld the right of the General Assembly to fill the Providence cove where Waterplace Park now stands after citizens objected, citing their constitutional right to shellfish there.


The court said “these rights of clamming and fishing are enjoyed in subordination to the paramount authority of the General Assembly to regulate and modify, and to some extent at least, to extinguish them.”


Said Nixon: “This is the most misunderstood provision in the Constitution and it does not afford very many rights to people.”
And with fin fish like striped bass and bluefish, which migrate annually into other states’ waters, federal and regional regulations supersede state laws, Nixon says.


Fred DeFinis, who lives in Wellesley, Mass., but keeps his boat in Rhode Island, says the federal program “stinks.”


“I can see the striped bass fishery going the way of the tuna fishery,” he says. “The commercial guys will take their limit and then the fishery will be closed to the recreational fisherman who is lucky to get a few keepers a year even when fishing without restrictions.”
According to the NOAA, those under 16, people on a licensed charter or guide boat and commercial fishermen would be exempt from the program. More details are available online at www.countmyfish.noaa.gov.