Fish Report 8/9/24
Opening 8/14 to 8/19
One Long Dagoned Comment on a Possible Huge Quota Cut for Sea Bass..
I rarely write very much in high summer. Notified recently of a possible 20 to 35% cut in our recreational sea bass fishery, the task was at hand and not to be ignored. Here a synopsis of my work fighting bad data and what management should be doing instead to make sea bass proliferate.
Hurricane Debby's remnants now overhead. I haven't any idea what mahi are going to do after this blow. Though forcing cancelations, Debby's winds don't appear too disastrous.
We had mahi, nice size for inshore too, weeks ago. I opened up mahi trips and hard south winds stirred cold water upward pushing them off. On my last mahi trip we found a school of 30+ smalls.
From Aug 14th to 19th I'm going to run sea bass & (maybe!) mahi trips with a light rail so everyone can fish going away from the boat. Fare is $225 and sells out at 12. (and maybe one more but I'd never advertise That Number..)
Anna is a one person operation. She might be slammed when I hit send. (or maybe not!) If she cannot pick up, Leave her a message. She has a method to her madness..
Reservations at 443-235-5577 - She has other jobs too. The line closes at 8pm and reopens at 8am. She won't take reservations for trips that are not announced.
If you want a spot call the reservation line at 443-235-5577.. Emailing me is no good - her service handles reservations. I'll have no idea what spots have been sold. I do check email for questions; check FaceBook messenger too..
***Be a half hour early! We always leave early!!**
..except when someone shows up right on time.
Clients arriving late will see the west end of an east-bound boat. Seriously, with a limited number of reserved spots, I do not refund because you overslept or had a flat.. If you're reserved and are the last person we're waiting on - you'll need to answer your phone. I will not make on-time clients wait past scheduled departure because of a misfortune on your part.
Sea Bass Size limit 13 inches - 15 per person. Also Seeing A Few Flounder. Their Size Limit Just Changed To 17.5 Inches..
Mahi are limited to 10 per-person and have no size limit save what your conscience allows.
Try to always leave a half hour early (and never an hour early!) I rarely get in on time either. If you have a worrier at home, please advise them I often come home late. It's what I do.
Trips Also Sometimes Announced on Facebook at Morning Star Fishing
https://www.facebook.com/ocfishing/
I post after action reports (or lack thereof) (and sometimes detailed thoughts on fisheries issues) for every trip on my personal FB page and Morning Star page. Posts including OC Reef Foundation work will be included on that page as well.
Bait is provided on all trips.
No Galley. Bring Your Own Food & Beverage.
If You Won't Measure & Count Your Fish, The State Will Provide A Man With A Gun To Do It For You. We Measure & Count — ALWAYS — No Exceptions!
It's Simple To Prevent Motion Sickness, Difficult To Cure. Bonine seems our best over the counter because it's (supposed to be!) non-drowsy. It's truly cheap & effective insurance. If it makes you a bit sleepy - but not chumming? That's a great trade!
"The Patch" of Scopolamine, however, is a prescription only that beats all comers.
If the ocean still wants to get the better of you? Zofran (anti nausea) can be a day saver if you have it left over from a prescription.
Honestly - If you get to go on the ocean once a month, once a year or even less; why risk chumming all day? And then there's the ebullience of youth! Of course you can party hard and go on a moderately rough ocean!
No you can't!
If you howl at the moon all night, chances are good you'll howl into a bucket all day.
Bring A Cooler With Ice For Your Fish – A 48 Quart Cooler Is Fine For A Few People. Do Not Bring A Very Large Cooler. We have a few loaners - you'll still need ice. Should you catch some monstrous fish, we'll be able to ice it.
No Galley! Bring Food & Beverages To Suit. A few beers in cans is fine for the ride home.
Don't have my reef block/pyramid counts ready.. Next time.
Fish Report 8/9/24 - On NOAA's Possible Sea Bass Quota Cuts For 2025/26.
Greetings All,
Was listening to some of Eric Clapton's later work, "Hello Old Friend" (a great tune at that) when news from MD DNR came quite the opposite. 'Be gone old enemy' seemed more appropriate.
I'd just received information from 'inside sources' (TY Steve!) within MD DNR that Fed Council/Commission/NOAA management are considering a 20 to 30+% cut in sea bass for 2025 & 26.
On the monitoring committee's conference call (MC are mid management science/management staff that lay out their recommendations which are almost always followed to the letter - and not the Super Smart Committee or SSC - OK, science and statistical committee - the smart guys who keep bad data firmly in play.)
It wasn't a shocker. But there's hope because this is much earlier in the process than usual for fishers to attempt to intercede.
If passed, however, it will be the cut that finally eviscerates our sea bass fishery off DelMarVa.
Don't think so? We're allowed 15 cbass at 13 inches. CT currently has the most generous season above us. They're allowed 5 sea bass at 16 inches. NJ is allowed 1 at 16 inches. Two states are at 16.5 inches.
My life's work has been about sea bass and fisheries restoration via regulation and habitat construction. Regs like that would shut my business in a heartbeat. For me then this is a regulatory fight to save my life's work - my business and everyone else's too that sea bass fishes along DelMarVa.. (Many other skippers are working on it also!)
These frequent troubles are firmly centered in NOAA's "MRIP" (marine recreational information program) recreational catch estimates. They've always been wildly innacurate since inception in 1981 and have come completely unglued in the last decade - since 2012 really.
MRIP's catch estimates are built on state by state and two month wave by wave 'effort' & 'catch' estimates. They're further divided by mode: eg Shore, Private Boat & Party/Charter.
Where commercial catch/landings are sold by the pound and reported separately--accuracy is fairly close. Party/Charter (often called ForHire) too must report landings for every trip. For Shore & Private Boat 'Effort' (the number of anglers and how often they went) was supposed to be firmed up when the saltwater tegistration/license came into effect. No such thing happened as NOAA is certain many anglers cheat. With that mindset the number of anglers gets much harder to fortell.
Here's an MRIP catch estimate familiar to regular readers. Please consider this example of Tautog in 2010 as a 'for instance' and not about our current dilema. I poked fun at the old estimating program's 73,000 NJ Shore tautog estimate; but when MRIP came out in 2012? "Hold my beer boys" seemed MRIP's attitude.
In example:
In 2010 all For-Hire Party/Charter throughout blackfish/tautog's entire range caught 85,441 tautog All Year - All Commercial throughout caught an additional 73,345 tautog that same year. That's about 159,000 tautog for All Professional effort in All of 2010. It's a pretty good representation owing commercial & recreational professionals must each report catch daily.
MRIP's 'recreational catch estimate' - an estimate that stands to this day (no matter how much fun I make of it!) is that New Jersey Shore/Jetty anglers (Just NJ!) and in just March & April, landed & kept 182,653 MORE Tautog than All professional Commercial & ForHire fishermen everywhere tautog are caught. (341,440 total NJ Shore caught and carried away in truckloads of imaginary buckets..)
This two month 'wave' occurs when NJ's Shore anglers are just starting to catch tautog. The very end of the March/April period is when waters might warm enough to get bit. Experts in the fishery doubt the real number would even reach a couple hundred tog - perhaps possibly approaching 1,000 pounds. Yet when converted to pounds of tautog MRIP holds that two-month NJ Shore catch at just over 800,000 pounds..
Oh.
OK.
Almost a million pounds of tog from New Jersey's thawing jetties..
That's a good example, easily understood, of how bad these estimates are.
It's in MRIP where NOAA is forever having nightmare visions of absolutely astounding numbers of Private Boat anglers catching incredibly more than a state's professional recreational effort. In many instances, MRIP will represent Private Boats from one state, in one two-month wave, extracting more sea bass than all Party/Charter from Hatteras to Cape Cod. At it's most severe; another example has NY Private Boats catching 2X as many sea bass as all trawlers, trap fishermen, and Party/Charter from Hatteras north!
Two Times More Sea Bass Than All Who Fish Sea Bass For A Living.
Sure they did...
That's the bogeyman having nightmares of Chuck Norris right there.. It's never happened - yet management thinks Private Boat "Effort" simply cannot be controlled.
By that I mean a regulatory tightening (fewer fish/shorter season/longer size limit) will show clearly in Party/Charter catch data. Regulation absolutely controls our extraction.
In Private Boats? The estimates are actually likely to show an increase in catch annually no matter how much regulations have tightened..
Then we, the recreational community, are accused and convicted of "overfishing" by statistic and must pay with tighter regulation still.
Not making this stuff up. Been fighting bad catch data since 1998. Aside a victory (with a lot of help!) in 2003 that still keeps Party/Charter data in line, I dern sure haven't had much luck.
NOAA claims MRIP's wild guesses will have to do. It's "The Best Available Scientific Information" they'll say, and must, by law, be used.
Promise - for now that's all we're going to get too.
More pending of today's issue, our accusations of landing sea bass far beyond recreational allotment/quota always stem from examples such as these two below - our future quotas, however, are in dire jeoprody from more than these. These two are just real life examples. They're not at all unusual estimates - just two from 2023 I've pried apart so readers can see the sausage being made....
In Virginia, I'm told by knowledgable skippers out of Lynnhaven Inlet, (VA's largest sea bass port by far) that Party/Charter sea bass effort skews more heavily toward professional boats than Private Boats - especially when weather is considered. Yet during May/June, 2023, VA's Party/Charter guys only landed about 5.6% of the 654,256 pounds of the sea bass MRIP 'estimates' VA caught.
If captains who go every possible chance - who make their livelihood recreational fishing are right? VA's total recreational May/June (wave 3) landings should be well under a 100k pounds - about 65K lbs- with Party/Charter landing 35k of them..
That leaves almost 600,000 lbs of ghost catch. No one ever saw those boats or those anglers or those sea bass - except NOAA's computers.
Take a look at this too. Sea bass are not a new species for VA Private Boats yet MRIP shows a May/June (wave 3) average of 23.2K pounds landed betwen 2010 & 2016 -- 37.0K pounds from 2017 to 2020 -- then a mega jump to 443K pounds average in 2021/22 (up an order of magnitude!) -- and up yet another 200K to 619K pounds in 2023..
Wow. That's an amazing increase in fishing effort!!
One wonders where on earth all the new boats were tied up. If every boat had four anglers each catching a limit it would take 655 boats every marginally fishable day to get there. I'm told there are fifty or so Private Boats participating on occasion - certainly not everyday from Lynnhaven Inlet. If you've been to Wachapreague or Chincoteague you already know the rest weren't steaming from those lovely small towns.
It's a complete farce - a 100% make believe catch..
Now also - in May/June 2023 NJ ForHire landed 113K lbs of sea bass. That's a lot for the fluke state, no? Those fellows have repeatedly told me they catch about 60% of their state's cbass.
But MRIP (as anytime ever..) has NJ's Private Boats catching just under a million pounds of cbass.
Instead of a 60/40 split favoring ForHire? We have Private Boat landing 8.7 lbs of sea bass to PartyCharter's 1lb or about 11.4% of NJ's sea bass being caught by Party/Charter to 88.6% Private Boat catch.
Gosh. NJ skippers sure have softened since I was a kid. Do they really let small Private Boats go in all weather while they stay tied up safe?
Um, no.
Wait.
That can't be right..
If the 'eyes on the water' pros in NJ told me right there'd instead be about 200,000 lbs of sea bass landed during May/June in NJ - Not 1.1 million pounds. That makes 900K of ghost catch by Private Boats full of skilled anglers no one ever saw except on NOAA's computers.
The fight for catch estimate repair may at last be gaining ground as current admin are taking a deep dive into this data's inaccuracies. Any correction will not be in time though. Their effort of reform & correction will have no effect on this round of regulatory tightening.
But what of declining sales up and down the coast and around the Country? There's no possible way recreational ForHire fishers caught anywhere near last year's numbers, or especially overfished the quota on sea bass. It's just impossible. I've had numerous trips with under 10 clients in July. That's never happened before. Other OC partyboats have had similar diminishment of angler participation. Two men who own veritable fleets of partyboats in other states have told me they too had their worst July ever.
Even the White Marlin Open is off 25+% of entrants.
I see Private Boats in their slips everyday. People are not fishing as much. NOAA could see that in VTRs (Vessel Trip Reports) we ForHire fishers send in for every trip if they'd only look.
And the decline is not just this summer, but spring too.
Did I mention the weather has been a world record pain in the anatomy?
Mercy..
No matter what common sense & logic dictate; no matter what professional mariners report to NOAA, they're going to use the MRIP data. And if it cuts fisheries off at the knees? Sorry about your luck boys... I'll have a link to the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC) at the bottom if you'd like to comment to your state's reps about it. They are NOT who posted the cuts - but they will be voting on their inclusion. All state reps distrust MRIP. All of em. Just kindly reinforce it.
My gracious but it's a sad thing.
Absolutely blinded to the ocean's realities by MRIP's recreational catch data blown far out of proportion; they have yet to even recognize our temperate corals as being of any import. NOAA's heavy-handed regulatory style has created the worst cbass fishery possible - the least amount of fish with the least possible economic benefit to fishers and accompanying businesses - in short, the complete opposite of "Sustainability"
..but they tell Congress the fishery is 2.5X beyond 'recovered.'
Withbauch fantastic success it's gard to comprehend why I believe our season - the last holdout - is on the chopping block.
Don't think so? No state has an honest legal sea bass fishery like we do along DelMarVa anymore. They're all regulated out. The often amazing fishery we so enjoyed for many decades here can be made better than it has ever been. I'm 100% positive.
Promise - Good people at MD DNR have pulled off miracles keeping our season open. They instituted "Regional Management" (DelMarVa) to insulate us from MRIP's data spikes. VA's recent rise as a sea bass superpower is about to nullify that effect. If this cut goes through? DelMarVa will be next and my business toast.
I tried for decades to use logic and Party/Charter skippers' observations to prove private boat data wrong. Only after a video camera was installed by MAFMC on Maryland's one ocean inlet could I prove NOAA's Private Boat 'Ocean Only Effort' estimates are entirely too high.
For Instance:
1) In July/Aug 2020 (wave 4) MRIP's total effort estimate for all ocean-only Private Boat effort in MD is 185,341 angler trips. Divide by 4 per boat and again by 60 days and you'll see 772 Private Boat trips a day leaving Ocean City MD's inlet. (Oyyyy.. Nonsense! Even the White Marlin Open would have just over 300 boats if they all went, and that's the biggest billfish tournament in the world!) So: MRIP has 772 boats a day..
Video boat count for the same period is 37,500 angler trips during the two month wave or 156 boats per day if using the same parameters of 4 anglers per boat and 60 days. That's 616 less boats & 2,464 fewer anglers per day.
Per Day!
(I'll note MRIP's July/Aug ocean-only high for Maryland in the last decade is 311,675 angler trips for 1,298 boats exiting OC Inlet daily or 5,192 anglers trips a day. Marinas would have been so profitable. Ahhh, actually? I expect we'd have to build a new marina, huge, to have that many boats fishing a day..)
Take Note - this expression of Private Boats landing too many fish can rarely be tracked back to individual Private Boat anglers taking too many fish in per-person measure. NOAA is not saying they're taking several limits each. Boiled down to what an individual's catch might have averaged usually seems plausible.
No - NOAA simply invents too many Private Boat anglers.
And I do mean 'invent' and 'too many.'
See Fish Report 4/3/23 - On Correcting MRIP's Effort Estimates With Video for greater detail..
I've written letters and papers on it since 1998. Please also see my work: "On the Theft of Marine Recreational Fisheries by MRIP Recreational Catch Data".. 2/28/22
This is "Fish Talk" magazine's take on that work. The piece is pared down but works - can email the original & many other pieces if you'd like.
https://www.fishtalkmag.com/blog/theft-marine-recreational-fisheries-mrip-recreational-catch-data
As Ajax, mightiest of mortal Greek warriors, fell into madness & roamed the night slaying sheep as though his enemy; so too has today's fishery management gone mad.
Their madness is MRIP.
I absolutely believe where sea bass are concerned We are NOT working on the right problem!
I've now seen 33 years of our sea bass fabulously climbing upward, only to crash back down as reefs become populated with a handful of large males who rule over harems as elephant or bison might. As on land where heavyweight dudes with the most muscle and horns always win; when large cbass are present, little guys ain't allowed to spawn.
Actually? Because a few sea bass switch from female to male to suit a reef's spawning population's need (Yup! Their biology is strange!) ..it's more accurate to say the presence of large males stops ANY small females from transitioning to male. And if they do? I believe they are run off (a sure death with no reef to hide in) or blinded with dorsal spikes of larger bulls. No special biological knowledge is needed. You can spot a male sea bass' iridescent blues & greens from twenty feet away. In my experience, and I've likely watched closer than anyone; with proper size limit regs our most heavily fished reefs become cbass spawning factories. When those regs fail and allow nearshore reefs to be populated by bullies?Spawning production fails and our region's spawning biomass drops from nearly 100% of ocean-found cbass to plus/minus 20% -- and those spawners are nearly all keepers - therefore the spawning biomass/population shrinks all summer.
What could go wrong?
When I began sea bass fishing in 1980 we'd have great numbers of fish in spring and tough summers. Any new spots found would provide a bonanza. As we began self management in 1992 with only a size limit, it was obvious management could really work & did. Fed management started in 1997. By the early 1990s sea trout/weakfish had collapsed (l'll always believe to striped bass predation in winter as management was quite stringent.) Now sea bass fishing from end of April well into December with no 3 month breaks for seatrout; with self regulation we did not instantly demolish what remained. Before long we would have high hook (one man) in late fall nearing 200 fish in his cooler. Yes, there was a size limit - our own size limit of just 9 inches, then the Fed's at 9/10/11, but no bag limit. It was not uncommon to have 30+ per person in summer. Fishing's extractions were simply well below spawning production and sea bass flourished. In 2002 a bag limit was regulated at 25 per-person. When I first fished my rig, the Morning Star, in 2003 I'd very often have 25 clients catch 25 legal sea bass and go home. I'd have clients almost everyday who would fish a 16 inch personal limit - not 12. I fished numerous days in 2003 where we'd begin with no bait/no lures - sea bass would bite bare hooks! (have been doing the bare hook 'trick shot' since the early 1990s. Still do.) On several trips when the bite on bare shiny hooks would taper we'd put a small plastic lure on both hooks and finish our boat limit. All those keepers had been spawned when there was no bag limit, no closed season and size limits much smalller. Again: fishing's extractions were simply well below spawning production and sea bass flourished.
Our pool winners from the late 90s into late 2000s were rarely under 4lbs.
I'd written in 2003 that the DelMarVa region's sea bass were then at habitat capacity - we couldn't hold any more. NOAA's top fishery specialist (in charge of 30 species and their every possible mode of extraction) held it was a one-off spawning event that created that bonanza.
Baloney.
We built it up from 1992 to 2003..
In 2004, however, that fabulous poulation was clearly coming unglued.
I finally pieced the cause of this incredible decline in sea bass together in 2006.
We'd witnessed science's "All sea bass have spawned by 9 inches, some twice" (An age one sea bass tops out at 9 inches..) But as the bag limit left many age two survivors, all our most heavily fished reefs became populated by at least a few larger bulls.
Took me 2+ years to run through every possible cause I could think of. There was absolutely no doubt: where we once caught hundreds of under 9 inch males - even over a thousand in a single day - by 2004 there were precious few under 9 inch males. Ask anyone who ever worked my deck - mates are instructed to watch for and measure small males. We've had several 10.5 inch males this year and a single age one under 9 inch male. All the rest are age 3 or better.
In 2015 our spring run of sea bass was at a historical bottom. Then and in 2016/17 I foretold a coming population increase - a boom as exponential population growth was renewed accross 525 sq miles in and near the MD Wind Area. I forecasted age one males, unfettered by bullies, who took on harems of their own would more than double our region's sea bass population annually.
They did.
After having been vacated by survey noise for almost two years, the MD Wind Area recolonized with sea bass. Spawning even at 6.75 inches in 2016/17, the population rose exponentially. We did indeed land our by-then 15 fish limits, even all summer, come 2018/19/20/21. I had predicted this rise would be followed by a diminishing population in 2022. It came in 2023 instead. These predictions were borne out entirely. As 2024 has been a tough sea bass year owing an again minimized spawning population, the future doesn't look bright.
We'll have nice fish - but still fewer limits.
Every expansion/contraction of DelMarVa's sea bass population has only tightened my belief that paying attention to when females transition to male - and not recreational catch data no one believes anyway, would go a long way toward revisiting 2002/2003's population highs. But science and management have always refused to believe what I'd bet everything I own is true.
Instead?
MRIP owns all of recreational management and a good part of commercial.
You see, those millions of pounds of recreational ghost sea bass (and summer flounder, and scup, and and and..) that exist only on computer are all calculated as if real in management's population/stock assessments. Fishery scientists therefore see populations much more vast than real.
From those grossly inflated numbers are borne "safe" commercial quotas.
Where recreational quota truly is safely 'taken' in ghost catch that never happened & is accompanied by false accusations of overfishing virtually every year; commercial landings are always going be as real as they can make em. No ghost catch there. They'll be sold if caught.
In 2018 MRIP's second "Recalibration" blew recreational catch into the stratosphere. Though middle managers were up in arms; upon seeing these huge populations on computer NOAA instructed management to raise commercial summer flounder/fluke quota by 49% and sea bass by 69%..
Anyone but me seeing the dire effects of those increases anywhere?
I bet so....
NOAA's current heads of Fisheries Science absolutely concur there is a real issue with recreational effort estimates - the "How Many People Went Fishing" part of MRIP. Personally? I don't think they grasp its immensity - but they are working on it. (I really hope so too. I am often in email contact with them.)
"NOAA to reduce recreational catch by 30 to 40 percent."
See
https://conservefish.org/2023/08/15/nmfs-finds-errors-in-recreational-fishing-data/
Though promising, that reduction in 'effort' is too little too late for this coming regulatory battle.
If you have skin in the game you need to write your state fisheries representatives now.
The meeting is next week.
If you just think NOAA needs to take MRIP behind the woodshed and dig a shallow grave after the beating?
Me too.
Writing Congress can be helpful - very much so. But this is of immediate need and Congress won't even understand the issue before it's over.
Your state's reps and emails are (or should be) here.
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council
Keep Fighting!
Monty
