Originally Posted by
finchaser
It is against this backdrop that the commercial fishing cheerleaders on the ASMFC are trying to push through yet another commercial increase.
Capt John McMurray -
Regardless, it’s not where the fish are, it’s where they aren’t, and looking at the Northern and Southern states in the striped bass’ range, clearly we’re seeing the stock contract. Even some managers reluctantly acknowledge this when faced with a documented decline since 2004 (the decline on paper isn’t significant enough to trigger corrective management actions), although they conveniently explain it away as the result of those good year-classes such as the 1996 cohort leaving the fishery, and the more recent good year-classes (e.g. 2003) have yet to be recruited into the fishery. Thus, according to the ASMFC Technical Committee striped bass numbers should go up soon.
I hope they are right, but I don’t believe they are. It’s hard to believe that we’re not killing too many fish when you can take a walk to any given marina in Montauk, or Cape Cod or any of the well known striped bass ports and see dumpsters full of big bass carcasses any given day during the season. And this is not something we can point the proverbial finger at the commercial fishing folks for. Recreational mortality accounts for almost 80% of the total. To put it in perspective, just the recreational discard mortality (the number of fish that die after we release them) is double the total commercial catch.
Even so, there is no justification for a commercial increase.