The big question in marine angler's minds, beyond the marine licensing issue that has been a hot topic lately, is any changes that may take place this year regarding recreational fluke regulations for the 2007 season. The Magnuson-Stevens Act which has the licensing issue at the forefront at the present time, also governs our marine fisheries regulations. States are bound to comply to the various species' specific management plans or face the possibility of having those same fisheries closed for non-compliance or the inability to prove their proposals for compliance.
Anyone who has been on the roller-coaster ride of varying and often conflicting fluke regulations (between the tri-state area of Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York), knows that regulations have been changing nearly every year for more than a decade and have seldom been uniform between the adjacent states in this area. Regulations are usually not set until the last minute, so there's a confusion factor regarding size and creel limits, open and closed season dates for states that are only a short boat ride away from each other.
The scenario has been typically all the states have been landing over their recreational fisheries quota as set by the regional fluke management plan. This means any over harvest from one year is subtracted from the next. The result has been a constant upward ratcheting of size limits, usually along with a reduction in creel (catch or possess in limits), along with various open and closed seasons of varying lengths. Basically it amounts to fisheries management chaos.
Last year, just like nearly every year since fluke management plans were put into action during the early 1990s, Connecticut and adjacent states landed more than their allotted quotas and will be forced once again to reduce their catch by whatever percentage they had overfished. This system, though flawed, has worked, despite being constantly under a cloud of confusion among anglers. The evidence for this fact is the rebounding of the fluke population from all-time lows in the early 1990s to considerably higher numbers over the last half decade or more.
The problem is last year (from a purely recreational point of view) in order to comply with the fluke management plan, states in this part of the ocean all instituted minimum length limits ranging from 1 1/2 to 18 inches, which meant most fluke fishermen caught many more "shorts" than keepers. The culling process that takes place when anglers catch a limit of large fish that are somewhat scarce, may have been inadvertently doing nearly as much damage to the fluke population as good, due to delayed hook mortality in deeply hooked fish that had to be released.
However, this mortality is a much greater factor among less experienced anglers and those who frequently "dead stick," which is the process of putting a rod unattended in a holder and checking it periodically. This is well and good when most fish are legal size, but very harmful to many fish when the vast majority, as much as 80 to 90 percent of a day's catch might be undersized.
A part of this problem, which is not addressed sufficiently or fairly in this formula, is the commercial trawl fisheries horrendous discard mortality. The waste, especially from the winter deep-water trawlers is far worse than anything recreational anglers at their worst could ever generate. Essentially, to some degree this winter fishery skims the cream off the top, leaving two percent for the inshore fisheries to fight over. Ever go to the docks and watch a wintertime deep water trawler unload their quota of fluke? It's disgusting. They average three, four or five pounds or more. Doormat fluke bring top dollar in the market, so to stay in business many boats cull their catch to maximize profits, regardless of the damage to the resource.
Why aren't there any of the smaller fish in that catch? Don't believe these boats only target and catch only big fish. They catch the little ones, too. In fact I've been told by people who worked these trawlers that it amounts to many times the poundage the commercial draggers are allowed to land. When a net is dumped on the deck after a long tow, after these fish have been squashed into the bag of the trawl, then pulled up from great depths they are in tough shape to begin with. Then they are literally picked through with a spike on a stick as big are sorted from small, which are then thrown back into the water dead or dying in order to bring in only the top quality jumbos for the market. It's a terribly wasteful and immoral practice. But it's going on right now until the monthly quotas are brought to port. (By BOB SAMPSON For the Norwich Bulletin (edited)
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