The author is the owner/operator of a commercial longline boat operating in the shark and grouper fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico.
The wishes of a few greedy or misguided persons are taking precedence over an entire industry's health and welfare.
That's just plain wrong.
We are told that every action has a reaction. Somehow the people who keep passing and adding regulation after regulation don't seem to understand this. The size limits on red grouper, for instance, which are so skewed as to cause fishermen to have to return mature fish to the water, have caused a huge upsurge in the population of smaller red grouper. There is much evidence to support theory that with all these 20" fish swimming around, breeding and thriving, that the fish no longer have a biological imperative to grow any larger. This is born out by anecdotal evidence that every fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico sees constantly, yet the occasional "scientist" that ventures out into the Gulf has no idea what he or she is about to see. Stories of scientists on board research vessels making poor and downright sloppy attempts to harvest enough fish to study, and then concluding that there simply are no fish to study, are common.
On the one hand we have laws that prohibit the feeding of dolphins (porpoises). This is supposedly because we are afraid of teaching the dolphins to rely on man for its food. However, we now have a trail of "undersized" red grouper, flopping around in attempts to return to the bottom, behind every fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico. It is, admittedly, much worse on a longline boat where the number of red grouper between 18 and 20 inches being returned to the water sometimes outnumbers the number of fish being retained 4 or 5 to one, but every boat fishing for red grouper is catching more fish that came out of that same "almost 20 inch" mold than they are catching large reds. The porpoises have learned, just in the last couple of years, that they can follow a fishing boat around and eat damn well with little effort. The problem becomes greater when some enterprising porpoise discovers that he can yank even bigger fish off the line as it travels up from the bottom. Now we are not only feeding porpoises, but we are both putting them at risk of being hurt by the gear and turning them from their historical role as a fisherman's friend, an animal he has delighted in his opportunity to spend time with and to see in their own environment on a daily basis, into an enemy that is stealing our catch and that we hate to see coming around.
The continuing and, in fact, growingly inept and downright bumbling and unfair attempts to regulate the snapper fishermen out of existence is another example. Any rod and reel fisherman, be it a commercial fisherman or recreational fisherman, will tell you that many of their once favorite grouper spots are now useless since they can't get through the huge numbers of juvenile snappers in order to get the grouper to bite. The snapper are much more aggressive feeders and chase bait (and presumably natural food supply) much harder than the bottom feeding grouper does. Somehow, the government continues to insist that their figures show that the snapper fishery is more and more stressed and needs more and more regulation. The last plan, with monthly openings, did nothing to protect the fish but certainly managed to ruin the market for the fish. Without a steady supply of any product it is virtually impossible to keep a steady demand for your product. Faced with dwindling and sporadic amounts of domestic snapper, does the restaurant industry abandon snapper on their menu? No, of course not. They turn to imported snapper and once again a domestically produced commodity is replaced by something produced in a foreign fishery with far less control, far less regulation, far lower quality and probably even government subsidy instead of the government insistence on putting them out of business that the U.S. fishermen face. Deciding that the current regulation just isn't working, the NMFS has gone for "more draconian" and has imposed IFQ's. Well, one says, that can be a fair way to allocate the available fish. Well, I challenge anyone to tell the number of fishermen I personally know who have historically landed their trip quotas in snapper every time there has been an opening and have yet been given amounts so small for their IFQ's, amounts of less than 200 pounds for a year's quota, that this program is in any way fair or equitable.
The recent confounding and unpredictable change in the shark fishery management program is another glaring example. On October 11, 2006 we were presented with a detailed paper that said in the Gulf of Mexico we had, in the first trimester of 2006, caught 103.1 metric tons of our 176.1 metric ton quota. We were then, a bit confusingly, told that those figures amounted to an under harvest of 119.7 metric tons. (If someone can do that math and explain it to me I'd be hugely appreciative as I come up with an under harvest of 73 metric tons no matter how many times I work the complex equation.) Regardless, we were then told that based on this wonderful math our 2007 first trimester quota would be 295.8 metric tons and that the first opening of 2007 would be from January 1 to April 30. There was much happiness and rejoicing amongst the shark fleet, who all have seen the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that the shark population is healthy and feel that the restrictions and limited participation that the regulations have imposed on the fishery have indeed had a beneficial effect. Many shark fishermen, myself included, proceeded to pile a few more of their eggs in their shark baskets, spending money to upgrade their shark gear and better equip their boats to handle the coming longer and more productive seasons while sadly neglecting their grouper gear and other potential financial avenues.
Then, out of the proverbial blue, on December 8, 2006, less than two months after the first report, we are told that simple subtraction is not the only math that NMFS apparently can't perform. We are asked to believe that between Oct.5,2006 and Dec.8,2006 enough new information has filtered in about landings that happened seven months prior to the first report to change everything. We are now told that during the first trimester season of 2006 we, in fact, landed 151% (or 336.6 metric tons) of our quota. There is no explanation of where the 233.5 metric tons were hiding between October 11 and December 8. There is no hint of how they could possibly have misinterpreted their own data so horribly. There is no indication that the new figures we are being given are anything out of the ordinary and should be anything but blindly accepted by the fishermen whose lives are about to be hugely and negatively impacted by this suddenly surfacing information. We are now told that the first trimester opening for large coastal sharks will not, in fact, be the 120 days we had been told two months ago was the plan. We are, in fact, told that the opening will be for 15 days, from Jan. 1 to Jan. 15. We are further informed that this generous opening only comes about because of the transfer of some of the quota from one area to another area in order to arrive at... well, I'm not sure just what they are arriving at.
The annual closure of the shallow water fishery, during a period that is supposedly when all those fish are breeding, while at the same time leaving the deep water fishery open is another example. In the first place, nobody thought to tell the grouper that they were all supposed to roe out between Feb 15 and March 15 every year and the damn fish continue to follow environmental imperatives as well as their own capricious nature and breed and roe out whenever they damn well please. In the second place, what exactly does the government think all those shallow water boats are going to do during that month? If they are at all capable of fishing in deeper water they will be out there, putting a huge increase in pressure on the deep water stocks. This then causes the deep water stock harvest to reach its quota much faster than ever before. In the last two years, deep water grouper has been closed before the end of June. Two years in a row the closure was scheduled for exactly the same day. This despite the fact that the second year there had been a trip limit of 6,000 lbs for the entire year. When asked about this by me in a phone call, the NMFS's response was "Yes, that's quite a coincidence, isn't it?". Indeed it is.
Currently, shallow water grouper fishing production is suffering from a number of factors, not the least of which is the fact that all the boats that would normally be fishing in deep water have been fishing for red and black grouper since late June. Coupled with this increased pressure, we had no major storms in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico this last summer. A hurricane or two, or at least a tropical storm, historically stirs up and moves around the fish making fishing in fall and winter improve for everyone. The combined result of the mismanagement of the deep water fishery and the current slump in shallow water production is that a whole slew of boats who have never participated in the deep water fishery are poised to run offshore the first week of January to try and catch some of these fish that haven't been targeted for six months. Never mind that many of the boats are small or are not particularly well maintained and don't belong that far offshore in the dead of winter. Never mind that deep water grouper harvest is historically something that has peaked in late spring. Never mind that many of the captains have little, if any, experience with that kind of fishing. All that matters is the fishery has now opened and will probably only be open for a short period so off goes a fishing fleet to hurry up and catch the deep water quota, probably even faster than last year, so everyone can begin targetting red grouper even earlier next summer than they did this summer. Once again a fishing fleet is put into additional and unnecessary danger while a fishery is overstressed due to inept and downright stupid regulation. Stupid regulation that is going to put the grouper fisheries, both deep and shallow water, into an inevitable death spiral.
The new regulations that require all vessels in the reef fishery to install and carry a VMS (vessel management system) at their own expense so that the government will know at all time s (24/7/365) exactly where each permitted boat is is yet another example. Why is an entire industry being treated like criminals? Why are people who have never received a single fishery violation citation being required to pro-actively prove that they are not breaking the law while they are working hard at making a living? Would the American public tolerate a device being forced on them that monitored their speed in an automobile at all times and reported to the Highway Patrol whenever they exceeded the speed limit? Would the American public be willing to pay for these devices and for the monthly service? Would the public be willing to pay for the manpower and technology to monitor these devices? Would the American public be willing to all wear ankle bracelets, even if they had never broken the law, to make sure they never went into places they weren't supposed to go?
I think not.
Sure, there is a program to reimburse many of the fishermen for most of the initial cost of these units. Who funded that program, anyway? Were you asked if that was what you wanted your tax money spent on? Regardless, the program doesn't cover the full cost of the only two units that the NMFS has approved for the program, this despite the fact that there are actually other units on the market that sell for less than half what the approved units cost and which do essentially the same thing. The reimbursement program doesn't cover any of the $660/year operating cost of the unit, a cost which can be considerably more if the boat owner, captain or crew actually uses the unit for his own benefit as well as allows it to simply transmit the boat's position to that high tech highly secure mission control monitoring station that NMFS has presumably set up somewhere.
One, at least this one, wonders what the real intent is. What is the real agenda? If it is not to put the American fisherman completely out of business then some new people need to be called in to run things around here because that is exactly what the current management of the Gulf of Mexico reef and shark fisheries is going to accomplish before much longer.
Michael Athorn: for grouperboat.com
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