CASTING COMMENTS On Firm Footing By Ted Venker TT
HERE IS a terrific place to wade fish along the Texas coast called the San Luis Pass. As the name suggests, it is a pass connecting the
Gulf of Mexico with West Galveston Bay through which a tremendous amount of water surges according to the tides. Fish travel the pass like a superhighway and the urge to wade out after them is strong, despite the fact that there may not be a more dangerous place on the entire Texas coast to do so. Dozens if not hundreds of fishermen and swim- mers have been killed in the pass as swift currents constantly rearrange sandbars in the area, sometimes even while you are standing on them. Many a fishermen there has had to ditch all of his gear and swim for it when the sand suddenly washed out from under his feet. The lucky ones make it back to shore with a new respect for the pass and a hard-won story to tell. In the San Luis Pass, a safe place on
which to stand is never a sure thing, and it is much the same for anglers when it comes to wading into the cur- rents of federal fisheries management. Struggling to shake its history as an agency dedicated solely to the manage- ment and promotion of America’s commercial fishing industry, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Fisheries has often been viewed with tremendous distrust by the recreational angling community. With the agency now under enormous pressure to uphold tough new conser- vation laws and deadlines, the federal system often seems as unstable as a sandbar in the pass. An erosion of faith permeates the
recreational community, and it is not undeserved. Among other things, recre- ational anglers have routinely found themselves shortchanged on allocations for mixed-use fish stocks that are pur- sued by both anglers and industrial boats. These allocations were usually set using backward-looking catch histories,
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and managers often selected suspi- ciously short time frames that grossly inflated commercial catch to determine a percentage for each sector. And feder- al managers have been notoriously unwilling to revisit any allocation despite cosmic changes in the econom- ics and demographics surrounding those fisheries.
The agency is also laboring under a
remarkable dearth of science in many of the fisheries it is charged with man- aging. Fisheries science is dreadfully
Although the sand- bars of fisheries management are constantly shifting,
the rock for CCA is as clear as it ever was.
inexact in the best of times and we have never found ourselves question- ing fisheries science as regularly as we do now. A very high-profile red snap- per issue in the South Atlantic drove home exactly how skeptical we should be when it comes to fisheries science. In 2008, the first modern assessment ever performed on South Atlantic red snapper discovered a stock so decimat- ed that managers proposed closing thousands of square miles to all bottom fishing lest even a single snapper die as bycatch. Alarmed that such drastic measures were proposed on the basis of a single assessment, CCA asked for a review of the science. The government responded with a second full assess- ment and in late December 2010 announced that it was delaying any bottom closures for six months, osten- sibly to digest new findings that sug- gest the bottoms closures could be much smaller, if needed at all. The new findings will likely lead to a completely different management regime not only for red snapper, but
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also the dozens of species that would have been impacted by a total bottom closure. Clearly this was a case where skepticism was warranted, and other questionable findings, such as those for gag grouper and red snapper in the Gulf, are reminders that we need to always be on our toes.
But, we also have to be guarded and not take skepticism too far. It is com- monplace now for stock assessments and fisheries science to come under intense attack and criticism every time a new regulation is proposed, but the risk of shortchanging the resource and cashing in our fishing future for our fishing present is very real.
Although the sandbars of fish- eries management are constantly shifting, the rock for CCA is as clear as it ever was. Our advocacy program seeks to ensure that stocks are man- aged to their historic range, age struc- ture and abundance. Guided by that philosophy, CCA is also committed to tearing down the barriers to realloca- tion that have shortchanged our sector for decades. Surprisingly, it is the relatively unglamorous scup fishery in the Northeast where this strategy is cur- rently finding real success. With that stock recently declared completely rebuilt, CCA successfully requested that federal managers begin an analy- sis to determine if the allocation, cur- rently set at 78 percent commercial and 22 percent recreational, is appropriate. For one of the very few times in histo- ry, if not the first time ever, a fishery management council and commission are seeking economic information to determine the allocation for a fishery. It is a precedent-setting move. There is danger and opportunity these days in federal fisheries manage- ment, just as there are every time an angler decides to challenge San Luis Pass. Anglers are right to be wary, but the keys to successfully navigating both require a solid foundation and a clear strategy.
TIDE
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