Cod Futures Up; Fluke, Sea Bass Troubles on 2014 Horizon
Here in the second week of December, the Rhode Island fleet—the sport fishing part of it, anyway—is in a holding pattern with the tail end of blackfishing coming right up, the weather too volatile to get back out toward the canyons for the small handful still pondering another shot at giants, and no real word of widespread cod activity south of Block Island so far. There’s quite a bit of total horsepower towing the mouth of the Bay in search of sea herring at this point, though with 90 percent of the 2013 sea herring quota mopped up, there’s no telling how long that fishery will hold up before the Area 2 quota resets in the new year. From the folks I’ve talked to, there’s a decent amount of bait around, but the bulk of it still seems to be well inside. The squid run has been strong in the canyons, notably Hudsons then Veatch, closing out a year when nothing has been predictable in that fishery. For what it’s worth, 2013 was the first season I ever heard about headboats in New Hampshire taking advantage of a summer squid fishery—and also the first time I heard about draggers in Gloucester offloading fair trips of loligo squid in the summer months.
In that regard, at least, we close out the year about where we started the season: Who knows what’s next for our squid runs? As for the immediate future of our winter cod fishery, word from a couple of my sources was of at least one decent trip worth of market- to medium-sized cod for a net boat fishing from the east side of Coxes eastward, and a few solid encounters for boats out of the Vineyard and other Mass ports that hit the 30-fathom spots east of Block from the other direction. Meanwhile, the TLC among other private local boats have recorded decent days between the fronts from Sharks Ledge and the Acid Barge eastward toward Coxes. Per the usual, some of the better days have been products of isolated bodiesa of fish on specific, top-secret hangs that will hold a few codfish even when there are precious few to be found elsewhere in the area. What this all means for the immediate cod prospects is not too clear, but at least there have been enough of them around to call the trips that have found them cod fishing.
If there are still a few straggler tog around, none of the usual suspects in late-innings blackfishing have been finding them. It seems that the fish have once again outlasted the fleet—thanks in large part to the schizophrenic fronts over the last two weeks. Then again, in my own humble little corner of the world, my family and neighbors have eaten days-old, “locally-caught” (inasmuch as Hudson Canyon is “local”) tuna steaks twice in the last week—albacore (longfin) once, and bluefin once—not something I’ve been able to say too many other Decembers. I love that my friends have the tenacity to stay in that brutal game right past the bitter end, pushing the limits of self-preservation and sanity into the months when tuna fishing leaves boats making ice the hard way (with their bows) on their homeward steams. I love that they have the cojones to steam 125 miles southward in Month Twelve because I’m not sure I do these days.
On a more tedious note, early word from the ASMFC is that we are looking at yet another big push by the usual suspects (NY and NJ first and foremost) to solve another round of botched fluke and sea bass landings—substantial overruns thanks to too-small allotments of quota and too-liberal regs in those states—by moving to a “regional” management approach. For those who recall the regionalization of scup management some years back, the chief justification for lumping RI, CT, NY, NJ and others together is that the generally slippery and occasionally bogus recreational fishing survey data (a la MRFSS) gets somewhat less unreliable (in terms of percent-standard-error) when you broaden the sampling area. In reality, the push toward regional penalizes those states that manage to properly constrain landings through regulations, by pawning off the sins of the other states that blew their allotments clean out of the water on everyone else. Bottom line? RI has done its job; NY has not. Now, NY will try to hornswaggle us into bailing them out. Stay tuned for further details on this winter’s fluke/scup/seabass fallout in an upcoming column.
One last bit of regulatory news. If you missed it, a semi-recent New England Council (NEFMC) meeting in Newport addressed some sea herring issues leading up toward Amendment 5. Notably, while many rod-and-reelers left the meeting a bit disillusioned with the glacial rate at which the mid-water sea herring fishery is getting reined in, the industry did move closer to requiring 100-percent observer coverage in the mid-water herring fishery. Given the amount of political juice tied up in that fishery, it’s important for readers to understand that progress is not always measured in explosive breakthroughs. The chief issue to be resolved relative to mandatory observer coverage is who will foot the bill: At the meeting, some players representing the pair-trawl fleet seemed willing to share costs with NOAA Fisheries—what most view as an idle threat given the near-total lack of available federal funds at this point.
In the meantime, the much of the sea herring fleet is working with SMAST (UMass-Dartmouth) and Mass MarineFisheries to provide real-time landings data to help scientists (and fishermen) avoid areas where there are likely to be concentrations of river herring. That by-catch issue is by no means simple, but it’s good to see signs of industry collaborating with management to solve complex fishing problems. For what it’s worth, I think one of the most critical ideas is to attempt to keep the pair trawlers (fishing operations whose efficiency is frightening) out of near-shore waters at least into mid-January, by which point much of the other life exiting Narragansett Bay and inshore grounds will have escaped seaward. As it is, all the meat getting mopped up by these massive out-of-state vessels gets trucked right out of our state before it ever crosses a dock or pumps dollar one into our local economies—just as it goes with all the RI fish landed elsewhere by NY, MA, and CT boats every season. Sooner or later, I’d like to see our state put some real economic protections in place to prevent wholesale abductions of the fish that set up shop in our home waters.
Thanks to all who provided feedback on the recent striped bass op-ed. As the weeks roll, and we address all kinds of topics relevant to Rhody’s saltier waters, I’d invite any and all of you to weigh in. You can make yourself heard (and if you have a good fish photo we can use, seen) by dropping me a quick line: zhfished@gmail.com. You can also track us down on Facebook: Coastal Angler Magazine Rhode Island. On a side note, please forgive my occasional typos and other heinous transgressions against the English language in these weekly bombs—because the primary objective is to relay timely information or analysis, I’ll freely admit that I don’t allocate hours to proofreading. If you do catch any comical typos (consider a bass less its ‘b’), please shoot me an e-mail and we’ll have a good chuckle over it. –Zach Harvey
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