Giant Tuna on Epic Feed At Hudson Canyon
In this, the first week of the winter format for these Friday-morning entries, I had planned to take a preliminary look at the winter cod fishing south and east of Block Island. But because there was a relatively strong response to the striped bass story that ran in our December print edition, Iâve decided to give that issue a bit more air time here, partly as a way to share some wisdom that came out of various reader comments. First, though, if you hadnât heard yet, thereâs been some high-voltage rod-and-reel activity unfolding within theoretical striking distance of RI out along the edge of the continental shelf, Hudson Canyon and points further west. At Hudsonâs, an absolutely immense fleet of tuna specialists has been working on a wide-open biteâinitially, a classic late-innings mix of bigeyes, yellows, and bluefins, and more recently a steady pick of mostly giant bluefins from 73 inches all the way upânot far from the draggers working on thick concentrations of offshore squid. A number of Rhode Island boats have gotten in on the act, especially since NOAAâs Highly Migratory Species division, the part of that agency tasked with managing âbig-gameâ (large pelagic fish) quotas announced a bump in the trip limit from the usual three giants up to five. While the majority of the fish taken lately have been in the smaller size brackets of the giant category, fish from 300 to maybe 500 pounds, with a few screamers in the mix. Because the fleet has been so huge, and the grounds so congested, the boat-handling aspects of the racket have proved a challenge for many, particularly when a 900-pounder takes a bait at full gallup and dumps the better part of a 130 on the run-off. Either way, folks have been making fast turnarounds to offload fish, take on fuel and ice, and get back out on the meatâtaking full advantage of what has been almost a week of unseasonably civilized weather to take the long steams southward.
Meanwhile much closer to the barn, the tautog bite is headed toward a total seasonal standstill, while there are still some codfish around, and more Atlantic herring filtering in by the week. Our striped bassâthe ones we had in huge numbers at Southwest Ledge, Block Island all summerâare likely hanging somewhere between Delaware and Virginia right around now. I spoke to a few folks down that way through the last week, and heard that the overall sizes of the fish as of two weeks ago between Delaware and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel was mainly comprised of fish between, say, 20 pounds and the mid-30s, with some fish up into the high 40s but precious few fifties encountered to date. The concerns weâve all been hearing about a stock dominated by big fish, with precious little in the pipeline in the way schoolies or small keepers, are certainly not unique to our region. Neither are concerns over the almost universal black-market problems.
As far as feedback from the striper story in our December issue (âPrepare for Impact: Striper Management Has Jumped the Tracksââyou can read it on this website), I was reminded by a surprising number of folks, including a few very much involved in the management via the ASMFC, who argued that weâre still on the safe side of the Spawning Stock Biomass (SSB) at this point. For those of you who missed Fisheries Acronyms and Jargon 101, that means there are more than enough large breeder bass out in the watery fore to reproduce the stock at its present levels, assuming no major disruptions in the recruitment (i.e. survival) rates (of juveniles into the overall stock). There is, however, widespread indigestion over the generalized failure of that recruitment in the Chesapeake Bay component of the overall stock, and a great deal of uncertainty about what the future holds in terms of the repercussions from Mycobacteriosis that is said to affect three-quarters of Chesapeake-origin bass.
Some folks in the bonanza stretches of the striper coastâBlock Island, Chatham, the Cape Cod Canal, etc.âwere quite reluctant to agree that weâre headed toward anything like a âcrashâ or âcollapse,â especially relative to the big one that predated the Moratorium of the 1980s.
One of the key concerns from the article is the fact that charter and party-boat fishermen have lost access to most of the alternative fisheries that saw them through the last Moratoriumâthat if this stock crashes again, it will be curtains for an alarming number of contemporary sport fishing business. As a result, I made the argument that we absolutely need to make room in the management process for the so-called âanecdotal informationâ (fishery-managementspeak for âfirsthand observations from real, live watermenâ) that plays absolutely no hand in the present management regime. By extension, where regulators are required to make decisions based on the available science, I believe managers need a measure of flexibility to use discretion when common sense is practically shouting that weâre headed for trouble. This brings us to a major point of criticism. Many who responded to the piece cited a litany of terrible abuses of various fisheries during periods when regulatorsâsome of whom had direct economic stakes in the very fisheries they were tasked with regulatingâhad much more wiggle-room as they shaped policy.
I canât really argue with them on that point, and frankly, it would difficult to grant them flexibility one way (to err on the side of caution even when a stock is âin the blackâ for SSB, and there are no overfishing concerns) without granting them flexibility the other (to keep a fishery open even when it was on the wrong end of all the science).
Then again, thereâs a reckoning coming at some point for the science managers use to regulate not just stripers, but all managed species. It seems that every time thereâs a chance, the green side of the fisheries dialogue manages to lobby successfully for additional legislative wording that heaps more and more weight (and thus credibility) on the so-called âbest-available scienceâ by requiring statistics be crunched in specific ways. Frankly, some of the fisheries data collection work is in need to a complete rehab. Unfortunately, in many scenarios, the science goes back 30 years, giving a fairly long time-set to iron out the statistical peaks and valleys that bedevil survey workâand understandably, where bureaucratic process puts huge weight on its numeric output, scientists shudder at the thought of abandoning 30 years of any data collected uniformly for long time periods.
The trouble is that, somewhere along the line, weâre going to have to retool the ways we estimate fish abundance per recent advances in the theory end of stock dynamics. If we continue to add weight to scientific data that simply canât carry the load from a credibility standpoint, we make it harder and harder to introduce common sense into the fisheries management process.
I suggested that sea bass are hugely abundant in the pieceâa conclusion a number of management insiders took issue with, mainly on the grounds that there are major ongoing concerns about the gender and size compositions of the overall stocks. One of my detractors pointed out that conclusions Iâd reached reflected trends only in my local watersâwhich is not the case: Iâve gotten reports from Florida, the Mid-Atlantic, Long Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and areas in between that sea bass numbers are skyrocketing. The science, it seems, doesnât support the observations of dozens of fishermen (a comment I do not mean as a snarky one).
The real point I was after via sea bass is that the very thing stripers need more than almost anything else is some other healthier, more accessible stocks to shoulder some of the sum of coastwide fishing effort. At present, there are too many stretches of season when striped bass are about the only viable game in town (thanks to severe restrictions on other fisheries). If nothing else, we need to put some alternatives in place in the event striper stocks start heading into a steeper down-trendâa distinct possibility, especially as we lose all those big year-classes from 2004 back, and begin fishing on more than five years of bass that never made it past the larval stage.
If you have any thoughts on the striped bass situation, or have a question youâd like to see us tackle in one of these weekly blasts, drop me a line: zhfished@gmail.com.
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