NJ Cracking the Fishing Whip

New Jersey Fish and Game officials are cracking down on anglers flouting saltwater fishing regs.

A report in the Press of Atlantic City has this eyebrow-raising quote:

“We sit and watch at the Point Pleasant Canal (in Ocean County) and find an 80 percent violation rate with (tautog),” Chicketano said.

80 percent violation rate with blackfish? Wow.

An, no, it’s not the economy, stupid. The conservation officer in the story said many of the violators have nice boats and cars, and many are in it just for the money fish like sea bass get from Asian restaurants in Manhattan.

A bunch of party boats are in trouble and could lose their filleting priviledges for filleting undersized fish, the Press reports.

With the regs getting tougher and tougher, it’s only natural that enforcement steps up. But we here from captains and anglers every week that the laws have gone too far, especially for fluke, and the tickets being handed out have gone overboard as well.

(Image via photobucket)

‘The Thing About Fisheries Management is, uh, We Were Wrong’

Throw back the lunkers and keep the schoolies. That’s the gist of an in-depth paper from the esteemed journal Nature on fishing’s impact on fish stocks.

Basically, the idea of tossing back the real pigs is the exact opposite of what is happening with the bulk of commercial and recreational angling. Oops.

I think most fly-fishermen practice catch-and-release, but there are a few headhunters out there among us and I respect their rights to take a few for the table.

But what about the non-fly anglers? As the Nature blog points out, limits on harvesting larger fish wouldn’t work because many of the fish tossed back (especially by commercial fishermen) die.

Salty anglers would find this ‘graph interesting from a Reuters dispatch about the report:

Writing in the journal Nature, Sugihara said that current policies that manage according to biomass targets instead of individual fish size can also destabilize the population.

Fluke fishermen in the northeast have been seriously pinched over the last few years because of biomass targets. Maybe it’s time to rethink, um, everything?