Plundering Stripers

The concept of managing a game fish for abundance, size and age-structure rather than maximum dead-on-the-dock poundage is utterly alien to Paul Diodati, director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. Diodati carries the torch for anglers who want to kill more than the two-fish daily limit, aggressively defending his make-believe commercial striper season against all who condemn it, and that includes the vast majority of the 550,000 unlicensed Massachusetts striper anglers. Diodati is also the chief architect of the ASMFC's rash petition to invite commercial and/or recreational fishermen from all Atlantic states into the stripers' last sanctuary--the Exclusive Economic Zone, extending 197 nautical miles beyond the 3-nautical-mile state limits.

Diodati makes no pretense that his "commercial" season provides anything more than gas-and-tackle money for recreational anglers or minor compensation for genuine commercial fishermen who, under his agency's watch, have wiped out other fish stocks.

"The commercial fishery has also changed by attracting thousands of non-traditional participants who are lured by the thought of subsidizing an expensive hobby," Diodati writes. "In addition, many full-time watermen who once paid little attention to this fish now focus their attention on the harvest and sale of stripers to help offset annual incomes that persistently diminish as regulations on other fisheries escalate."

The Massachusetts for-money, recreational striper season with its Orwellian moniker "commercial" represents everything that is wrong and ugly about how we treat this magnificent game fish. It teaches and encourages greed, and it is a prescription for poaching and black-market commerce.

For example, the "commercial" season has spawned a common practice known in the law-enforcement community as "ice fishing." You buy commercial licenses for yourself, your wife, your daughter and your son. Then you go out on a non-commercial day, catch as many fish as you can, and ice them down. The next day you sell 30 fish, your wife sells 30, and your kids unload the rest.

And commercially licensed anglers like to jumpstart the season before it opens because the first one to the fish market on opening day can get as much as $3.50 a pound. With the glut, the price may drop to $1.90 by the time you've legally filled your 30-fish limit, so stripers have a way of getting sold just a few minutes after the season opening at 12:01 am.

The very presence of a legal market elsewhere facilitates a black one in gamefish states. And in legal-commerce states poaching and illegal sale is even more out of hand. In New York City poachers are so brazen they no longer bother to be surreptitious about it, loading their boats with shorts in broad daylight. Report them, and they'll trash or sink your boat, as two of my guide friends can attest. Enforcement is nil.

Few states are more rapacious than Maryland. Because fish run small in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland wangled a special recreational size limit of 18 inches. But then the charter fleet wanted a crack at the spawning cows that run up the Susquehanna in spring. So Maryland wangled a special regulation for them. Meanwhile the state's commercial fishermen are plundering the depressed, emaciated and mycobacterium-blighted stock in the bay.

The greed feeds on itself. On August 23, 2006, with the Massachusetts commercial season winding down, agents from the state environmental police, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the US Coast Guard boarded five boats and seized 1,100 pounds of stripers illegally taken in federal waters off Chatham. As one of the boats attempted to flee the enforcement teams, the crew frantically threw fish overboard. A month earlier Buddy Harrison, a well-known Chesapeake charter skipper who owns a fleet of a dozen boats, a restaurant and a seafood processing plant, and had served as a member of Maryland's advisory board on striped bass, acquired his fourth citation for striped bass violations. This time it was for processing short fish.

In 2004 a two-year undercover sting by the Virginia Marine Police--aptly named "Operation Backdoor"--took down 14 people at 13 fish markets and restaurants for illegal trafficking in seafood, mostly striped bass provided by recreational anglers. An earlier operation had resulted in 30 arrests.