Denying Sanctuary To Stripers

One of them, who attended the ASMFC's August technical committee meeting, said this on condition I not use his name: "If what happened in that assessment holds true, we are retrogressing quickly. The first run [of data] showed spawning-stock biomass equivalent to 1995 levels. And that's in excess of F=.5. There might be an error in the assessment; we don't know yet. But it created one heck of a buzz."

On top of all this there is an ongoing crisis in Chesapeake Bay, the main striper production area for the entire Atlantic. Tag-recapture data from Maryland and Virginia at spring spawning grounds indicate survival has declined from 60 to 70 percent in the mid-1990's to 40 to 50 percent. Concurrently, there has been drastic decline in average weight, possibly the result of a crash in the bay's menhaden population. Stripers captured in autumn are physiologically indistinguishable from fish starved in the lab for two months. More than 70 percent of Chesapeake stripers are infected with Mycobacteriosis, a disease that causes lesions on skin and spleen, and managers suspect that anglers are culling healthy fish, thereby selecting for disease.

According to NOAA's Federal Register notice, ASMFC's reasons for recommending an open EEZ are as follows: "Currently, recreational and commercial catches are occurring in the EEZ and these fish are required to be discarded. Opening the EEZ will convert discarded bycatch of striped bass to landings. . . . There are expectations among a number of fishing industry stakeholders that their past sacrifices would result in future opportunities to harvest striped bass, and therefore, there are potential credibility issues associated with keeping the EEZ closed. . . . Fishing mortality is currently below the target level [untrue], and spawning stock biomass is 1.5 times the target level [thanks to two great recent year classes in a species notorious for wild fluctuations in spawning success]."

Opening the EEZ will indeed "convert discarded bycatch of striped bass to landings." It will also facilitate more landings by transforming an incidental fishery for cow stripers to a directed one and, at the same time, create a free-kill zone for poachers. In all my years of chasing striped bass I've been checked by a game warden exactly once, and when he saw my fly rods he didn't even look in the fish box. Essentially, states don't enforce striper regulations in their own waters; and they can't enforce them in federal waters. The feds aren't serious about enforcing striper regs either; about all they do is homeland security. As a result, poaching is rampant everywhere. I know a guide in New York who sees poachers clubbing stripers most every time he goes out; they don't even bother to do it surreptitiously. Once he reported one of them to the Coast Guard. Next morning he found his boat sunk at its slip with all the electronics bashed in. On the Chesapeake you're apt to get your anchor hung up in illegal gill nets.

In an open EEZ, bycatch will be replaced many times over by discards. Most discards will result from an illegal practice called "high grading," which can be done at no risk in an unpoliced environment. It's happening already, and here, from eye witness Michael Deckard of Ocean City, New Jersey, is how it works. This from his letter to ASMFC's management director, Robert Beal, describing a trip to Oregon Inlet, North Carolina on January 22, 2003: "I witnessed, firsthand, 10 to 15 trawlers [some in federal waters] netting huge schools of striped bass (within 200 yards of our boat) pulling their nets over an hour, on each pull; and then to our disgust-culling just the really large fish, stabbing the others (my friend called it 'picking'-so they wouldn't float) and throwing the rest back dead! After they unloaded their nets, they went back to netting again. . . . I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. I asked my friend (the captain) how this could happen and he said it's a loophole in the law. The state of North Carolina allows this one or two days a month-each trawler is allowed 100 fish."

Right now enforcement in the EEZ is relatively easy (or would be, if it were attempted). If you see recreational or commercial fishermen retaining stripers or even targeting stripers, you bust them. But in an open EEZ a boat from a state with no striper regs could steam into, say, the wintering grounds off the Outer Banks, load up on cow stripers, go home and sell them. Or a boat could fill up 3.1 nautical miles off a state that doesn't allow commercial striper fishing, such as Maine, dock at any Maine port, and sell the catch, thereby rendering the species' state gamefish status meaningless.

"The commercial catch is already terribly understated due to the presence of a large illegal harvest," write Brad Burns and George Watson of Stripers Forever. "Public records are filled with hundreds of violations, some of great magnitude. . . . Some estimates of the illegal commercial catch run up to 50 percent of the legal one, but the ASMFC makes no allowance or estimate for this illegal catch. Allowing a commercial harvest and possession limit in the EEZ will facilitate the 'legal' transportation of striped bass that will subsequently be sold illegally, frequently labeled as another species."

This isn't the first time ASMFC and NOAA Fisheries have tried to open the EEZ. They made the same proposal in 1996, then backed off under withering fire from anglers. "I remember those public hearings very well," reports J.B. Kasper in the Trenton (New Jersey) Times. "The first one was shut down by the fire marshal because over 700 sportsmen showed up in Toms River at a meeting place that was only meant to hold 125 people. The fact that the majority of the people who showed up were sportsmen versus only a handful of commercial fishermen, which almost [caused] a riot, forced the powers that be to reschedule two more public hearings." Although New Jersey law forbids netted stripers to be landed and forbids sale of all stripers, the state's commercial draggers lobbied furiously to reopen the EEZ. When asked why they wanted to catch fish they couldn't legally land or sell, they didn't respond.

Opening the EEZ isn't popular even with the states. In fact, most are opposed. "The real pressure is coming from commercial fishermen," says Charles Witek, Fisheries Committee chair of the Coastal Conservation Association (CCA) New York. "Mostly they're in Massachusetts, where there's some offshore structure, and in North Carolina, where there's this huge body of wintering fish. The commercials want those fish. On the recreational side the pressure is coming, again, mostly from Massachusetts. Perhaps a little bit from Virginia and a low hum in New York. The Montauk charter boat captains want to bass fish and then go offshore for blues or bass. They get a few bass when they're jigging bluefish more than three miles out, and they want their customers to be able to keep them."

In 2003 NOAA Fisheries estimates that anglers caught 17 million stripers of which they intentionally killed 2.4 million and accidentally killed 1.7 million. The same year, commercial fishermen took 1.1 million fish of which 262,000 were dead discards. Those stats tell us two important things: 1) way too many fish are being killed by both sides; and 2) commercial striper fishing is a minor, part-time business that--unlike angling--contributes little to the economy. What the stats don't tell us is that, although the commercial kill is roughly 27 percent of the recreational kill, anglers outnumber commercial fishermen by about 500 to one. So commercial fishermen, per capita, take about 134 times more stripers than anglers.