New York takes it on the chin with 2009 Summer Flounder fishing regulations

It’s likely that New York will have a very short season, very high minimum size and a very small bag limit for summer flounder (locally called fluke) in 2009, while in adjacent states’ regulations will be much more bearable. Party boat captains and the tackle industry in New York will undoubtedly suffer as anglers flock to such states with looser restrictions. It didn’t have to be that way.

Based on the best available science, fluke quotas are set by the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council each August, for implementation on January 1 of the following year. Currently, states are allocated a share of that quota based on their share of the catch in a single year, 1998, and each state must adopt regulations that will theoretically keep its harvest within its assigned share.

Unfortunately, there are big problems with that approach. In 2008, all but 3 states along the coast exceeded their share of the recreational summer flounder quota. Such overfishing under the current system is chronic. States inherently want to give their anglers the best possible fishing experience, which equates to adopting the most risky set of regulations that they can convince biologists to accept. Fishery managers now have plenty of real-world experience that shows the practical difficulty—and perhaps impossibility—of properly constraining harvest through that approach.

Furthermore, the data collection system used to determine quotas each year was never intended for state-by-state quota management, and lacks sufficient precision for such use. And fisheries biologists believe that the rebuilding summer flounder stock has redistributed itself northward during the summer, creating patterns of abundance far different than those of 1998, which gave rise to the current allocation.

The National Marine Fisheries Service and Mid Atlantic Council staff has acknowledged the abundant drawbacks of the current state-by-state system and have recommended standard coast-wide measures for summer flounder with a bag limit of two fish at 20” and season from May 1 to Sept 30th.

Such an approach would provide the opportunity to create a new baseline, in which state harvests are based on where the flounder are caught today, rather than where they were in 1998. Coastwide management would also improve the precision of catch estimates, employing the data collection system at its intended scale and making overfishing easier to curtail. It would also bring a modicum of fairness to anglers in New York, who have been forced to fish under the most stringent regulations on the coast simply because the flounder choose to summer here.

Such arguments were made at the Mid Atlantic Council meeting on December 9th. However, Council members rejected measures based upon the best scientific information available, are fair and equitable amongst states and that would better ensure the recreational harvest limits would not be exceeded in 2009. Instead, most voted solely for self-interest and the status quo.

New York remains stuck with a management system which is impossible to administer, fails to protect the summer flounder and causes significant hardship to its anglers and angling-related businesses.

The State of New York, through Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, is suing the National Marine Fisheries Service on behalf of the recreational fisherman of New York, to change the way fluke are managed. The judge hearing the case should heed New York’s call for better data and better management for the flounder and equity for New York’s anglers and related businesses.