Fish Report 2/18/13

Fish Report 2/18/13

Going Again

Council Meeting

Omnibus Amendment

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I see several tentative windows - Long Tog Trips All - Friday, 2/22/13; Saturday, 2/23/13 & Monday, 2/25/13 - All 5:30 to 5:30 - $150.00 - 16 Sells Out.

I've seen Expert tog fishers get skunked lately. If you can't deal with the heat...

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Reservations Required @ 410 - 520 - 2076.

LEAVE YOUR BEST POSSIBLE CONTACT NUMBER - Weather Cancelations Are Common In Winter - I Make Every Attempt To Let Clients Sleep In If The Weather's Not Going Our Way..

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No Live Fish Leave The Boat - Dead & Bled - Period. (I Believe The Live-Fish Black Market Is Hurting This Fishery)

All Regulations Observed - 4 Fish @ 16 Inches.

Green Crabs Provided. You're welcome to bring any hard bait: Lobster, White Crab, Blue Crab, Hermit Crab: Even Gulp Crab .. No Squid, No Clam = No Dogfish. Cbass jigs OK away from the tog bite IF they're working. Temps are dropping, cbass are few & far between inshore.

Be A Half Hour Early - We Like To Leave Early.

Clients Arriving Late Will See The West End Of An East Bound Boat..

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3,672 "Oyster Castle" Reef Blocks By The Rail. (904 @ Jimmy's Reef)

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Greetings All,

Had one trip last week. Not what we wanted but I think all aboard knew we were not gifted with a good bite. Pool winner was a guy who got skunked with me the week before. This week he had a double-digit tog & the only limit. Others nicked a few. Surprisingly, a couple legal sea bass found a hook too.

We'll go again, I hope in a "calm before the storm" scenario.

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Wind howling & snow; worked the OC Reef Foundation booth at the boat show Saturday & Sunday. Newly re-done & formatted charts were a hit. Sold some t-shirts with the only real representation of our natural reef ecology to be found. I'll have them onboard for $20.00 or you can contact Marta at <ocreef@msn.com> for membership. She's starting an email roster for OCRF news too -- calls for volunteers, sinkings, SMM-grams (send more money telegrams) and functions like the spring dinner @ Hall's will be announced via email.

A low-tech booth, we used 8 x 10 glossies (many u/w shots by Michael Eversmier) to show attendees corals growing off our coast. Lots of folks, even at a boat show, have no idea we have nearshore corals.

Lots of managers & scientists have no idea either.

I'm positive fisheries restoration would be much further along if the recreational catch-estimate folks had to hold a bake sale or sell a t-shirt & we got to spend their budget on re-reefing the Mid-Atlantic..

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I was at the MAFMC meeting in Hampton Roads last week to tell Council Members about the quality of MRFSS/MRIP recreational catch estimates being used to seize our recreational fishing opportunities.

Pretty lousy estimates; Having written about them so often, I was able to wing a well-received verbal comment on Maryland's recreational catch estimates for 2012 during a "Listening Session" with our Regional Administrator, John Bullard.

The upper-reaches of management have always believed the press releases, believed the data's really getting better: After all, the people creating estimates keep telling everyone they're better.

I think they're worse - lots worse. I'm positive bad estimates will soon have much more impact on our remaining fisheries if no action is taken.

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Different: Old-time Council members remarked positively about my comment during the listening session. This perhaps as Congressman Benjamin Fuller proclaimed in his fisheries speech of 1878, "Its gross injustice is too painfully apparent to permit anyone to defend it."

He was worried about paying Canada off for fishing inside their 3 NM line. I'm worried about losing even more season & quota to estimates no one believes but are used anyway..

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There's an Omnibus Amendment on Recreational Accountability Measures being fast-tracked through the Mid-Atlantic Council process.

Looks to me as though it contains language managers could use to shift an estimate away from the centerpoint. If, say, an estimate similar to the Mar/Apr 2010 NJ shore tautog estimate were going to trigger Accountability Measures--close or dramatically cut a season--managers could adjust the estimate before blatantly false information was used. For instance, where that particular estimate's centerpoint claims NJ shore fishers caught 173,100 tautog in early spring, yet they actually caught a couple hundred at best, managers could now adjust the estimate within its PSE or "margin of error."

Every statistician I've spoken with says PSE is absolutely part of the scientific answer to, "How many fish did they catch?" and not just the centerpoint. Their complete answer is 173,100 tautog with a "PSE" or margin of error of 86.4 .. (really? point four?)

Therefore, where MRIP has this NJ tog estimate's PSE at 86.4, their graph reveals the entire answer to "how many tautog did fishers catch in Mar/Apr 2010 from NJ's Shore" as; "We're 95% confident the answer is between 465,000 and zero tautog."

I suppose mathematically you could assert perfection. Is that why its better in the press releases? After all, the real number of fish caught off NJ's jetties in Mar/Apr has to be in that spread somewhere.. To get to 100% certainty you'd have to double the high-side: Here between 754,000 and zero tautog.

The centerpoint estimate alone is higher than all US commercial landings for the year. The shore estimate comes in sky high at a time when catch & effort are near-zero.

Pretty neat trick coming from our Congressionally mandated catch estimate repairs.

I believe press releases touting improvement to our catch estimates are premature; That we really would be better of buying bargeloads of granite with this money instead of bargeloads of fertilizer..

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The Omnibus Amendment on Recreational Accountability Measures may finally address PSE in catch estimates and allow its use as a sliding scale in management's decisions. Need to find a method of raising zeros too.

It's a big deal.

I anticipate we'll be able to make comment in a few weeks time. I'll be sure to give everyone a heads-up.

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Join the Reef Foundation.

We're laying the groundwork for much better fishing.

Much better to make fish than make up estimates.

When the fed gets their data cleaned-up, when they truly have firm estimates and see their herculean efforts were very often misdirected; when they truly see these emergency closures causing hard & harsh economic pain were founded upon vacuous estimates containing truth only at the shallowest point in PSE: When the fed sees the truth of their recreational catch estimates, I believe they'll help build reef.

Big barges of boulders piled atop engineered concrete: Fish & coral won't be able to stop spawning.

Regards,

Monty

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