Fish Report: Bureaucracy 12/10/09

[jackdaniels]

Fish Report: Bureaucracy 12/10/09
It Gets Worse
Letters on Paper Can Stop the Madness


Greetings from the Coast,
If you enjoy spring sea bass fishing you might want to make a few notes, tuck some favorite photos in an album... The very short season the monitoring committee has in mind--or, more properly, got boxed into for next year does not include May.
Handwriting--pen to paper--your Washington DC representatives in support of 'The Flexibility in Restoring America's Fisheries Act' may be the only possible means of clearing away this bureaucratic debris.
Over the last several years economic & cultural considerations have been completely removed from the management process. Nearly all the decisive power rests with the science and statistical committee -- the SSC.
The MAFMC & ASMFC--this the Council and Commission---wanted to keep sea bass open this past fall. Their joint monitoring committee wanted to double the cbass quota for 2010 because the species is considered rebuilt & not at all overfished. Still, the SSC, with all their new-found power from the reauthorization of the Magnusson Act, swiftly moved against all this.. NMFS then trumped the whole process and shut the cbass fishery down: leaving fishers crushed in the deepest recession since the great depression.

Feet up on a desk, papers moved to the 'rebuilt fishery' stack; perhaps some hope for employee-of-the-month? January.. automatic cost of living increase?
That kind of attitude, "Eh, we can't change it," while many fishers ponder economic crisis wrought of bureaucracy; the boats with which we make a living, homes, educations for our children; even grocery money: all teeter -- balanced against insanity only by the hope that DC can smell rotten legislation as well as we can smell rotten bait..
Sure hope those feet are comfy on that desk.

I have to hope too there are some in fisheries that despise what is going on, but down the hall the boss writes reviews: That would put them in the same boat as us..

What was nearly a year round fishing season, sea bass, the last of Ocean City's traditional party boat fisheries, may now become a 2 month derby. The economic pressure to stay in business--just make the payments--is exactly why many of the shipwrecks I fish were once surf-clam boats. By the early 1980s the council gave 'em one day a month to fish: And they went -- just didn't always come home. The Patty B, Atlantic Mist, Norman D; more: Men died for want of management, it was a brutal time in fisheries.

So is this. You can take the economic and cultural considerations out of management's hands, but you can't remove them from the marinas, from the fishers..

A hand-written letter is better. One cancelled stamp carries the weight of dozens of those email or postcard jobs..

The science and statistical committee represents bureaucracy deeply insulated from voters.
Only way to change this is through federal legislation, a real Act of Congress... And those folks just happen to be pretty busy - Hand-written letters are key to getting their attention.. Support the "Flexibility in Rebuilding American Fisheries Act of 2009".. Even if you live in Minnesota or Wisconsin, you have representatives that are on the various committees that will be moving this legislation through.. Or blocking it.

I suspect that very nearly the whole east coast now has some manner of major regulatory fisheries mismanagement, fishers might get heard above the din.
Have to try.
I have pushed and pushed for conservation regulation--had regulations aboard years before regulation even started. Now this single entity's control, the SSC, has gone too far. Fisheries 'science' and the 'statistics' it relies on are still far more art than science - flexibility must be restored to this process.

Scup, red hake, sea bass, sea trout, summer flounder, sturgeon, atlantic mackerel: all these species should be managed regionally. Using single-stock "coastwide" management plans for these many species who have distinct sub-stock spawning groups is an irreparably flawed approach.
Data-poor fish abundances, data-poor catch estimates, data-poor habitat analysis - and all the power rests with the few who are the data-poor Science and Statistical Committee..
That blind bull may yet conceive a calf; but pity the other animals in the barnyard..
A close examination of sea bass will show that I am not mistaken: You can not create an abundance of cbass, and keep it, without at least regionally delineated quotas.
A look around to see if cbass live on some special type of habitat might accelerate the restoration.
This fishery is almost lost for a management plan that will not, can not & has not worked.
Unless..
Write a letter.
Thanks and Best Regards,
Monty

Capt. Monty Hawkins
mhawkins@siteone.net
Party Boat "Morning Star"
Reservation Line 410 520 2076
http://www.morningstarfishing.com/

[eppefour]

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