Fish debates
After nearly 15 years of online fishing forum participation here at Reel-Time and on USENET, I feel eminently qualified to weigh in on those magic topics that are guaranteed to ignite a flame war and bring out the tin-foil-turban element in any online fishing community.
Get someone going on the ethics of catch and release, and the conversation is always bound to end badly. For some reason that firefight has died down in popularity, to be replaced with the ever-emotional debate about gamefish status for striped bass.
Gamefish status would protect stripers from being caught commercially. It could also protect them from being kept by recreational fishermen for food — essentially the fish would be left alone for sporting purposes.
Commercial striper fishing in Massachusetts is limited to hook-and-line fishing — no trawlers, no nets, no hand grenades. The powers that be designate a certain number of pounds to be allotted to the commercial fishermen, open the season some time in the summer, and close it when the quota has been filled. Little old ladies who can’t heft an 11-foot surf casting rod over the rocks of the Cape Cod Canal are then able to buy the fish in their local fish markets and cook up a dinner or two.
The pro-commercial crowd points out that recreational striper fishermen take WAY more fish, kill lots in the process of catching and releasing them, and that the commercial fishery is a traditional way of life that shouldn’t be banned. So was market-gunning for ducks.
My point of view — fishery statistics be damned — is to stop commercial fishing for striped bass. The food needs of the public can be satisfied through aquaculture and I don’t buy the argument that aquaculture impacts menhaden stocks due to the composition of fish food.
I think the recreational limit needs to return to 36" and be limited to one fish per day. I also support a saltwater license so the recreational lobby can be counted — Mitt Romney’s sticky little fingers not withstanding (he has a penchant for raiding the fish and wildlife funds filled through the sale of freshwater fishing licenses.) I also support a ban — ala Connecticut — on the use of herring as bait, a moritorium on eels, and a ban on factory fishing for menhaden.
A certain pedagogue who was banned from Reel-Time for pedantically and emotionally attacking anyone who dared opposed his Freedom to Fish agenda, has resurfaced elsewhere, spouting the same tedious statistics and conspiracy theories. Recreational fishermen with any commonsense need to band together under the umbrella of a license and demand reform in the management of their fisheries, management that is now dominated by the commercial interests that have a financial stake in the discussion. Time to let common sense reign and return to the conservation ethic that restored the striped bass in the 1980s and could, if applied forcefully, stave off a certain collapse in our inshore fisheries.
Climbing down from the soapbox ….
April 28th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Dave I could not have said it better. We need to really limit if not eliminate commercial striped bass fishing all along the east coast if we ever expect to have a decent fishery in the years to come. I’m all for a salt water fishing license here in MA and elsewhere.