Stewardship

A Good Omen for our Fisheries

By Terry Gibson, Senior Editor

Last week, Mike Conner, John Kelly and I left the Jensen Beach boat ramp a little after sunup, for an ambitious day of fishing and filming offshore then inshore. Success depended hugely on the weatherman being right. He called for northwest winds to 5 knots, increasing to 10 to 15 knots in the afternoon, with seas one to two feet.

That fool didn’t just get it wrong; he got it “bass ackwards.” But in a way I’m glad he did. Thanks to float plan B, we saw something none of us had ever seen before, something that I’m taking as a positive omen for our fisheries along the Eastern Seaboard.

The plan was to cruise the beach and hit some nearshore wrecks in search of cobia, big jacks and tarpon. We’d stop by the mackerel hole on the way to catch dinner, plus a few for the smoker, and then we’d run inside the Indian River Lagoon in search of pompano and trout.

There was already a one-foot chop in the river as we headed south, with shrinking optimism, toward the inlet. As soon as I broke through the inlet and turned north my 23-foot Bay Ranger north, I realized that fishing the beach was a no-go. It was two to four, short and sharp, with filthy water. So, we ran south to the mackerel hole, which is somewhat protected from swells by the north end of the Great Florida Coral Reef Tract.

It was rough enough to keep me at the helm for safety’s sake, but I enjoyed watching Mike and John put a dozen jumbo macks in the boat. It’s nice to have two guys onboard that can sling a sinking line a country mile, and who pay attention not to snag each other, or me. Despite a rocking boat and gusts to 20-knots, the only things they hooked were fish.

We ran inside and began an almost fruitless day of inshore fishing. Lots of things were working against us: a bright moon, high pressure and cold water courtesy of the cold front that had passed through two days before. The small jacks we caught felt like they’d come from a freezer. Mike caught one nice trout mid-afternoon, and we skipped a handful of small “pompa—no.” We threw every jig and fly known to fly and light-tackle anglers without earning so much as a bump. Most frustrating of all, though, was the fact that the wind dropped to nothing early afternoon, once we were 10 miles from an inlet.

About 4 pm, we decided to head back to the ramp. A couple miles back down the Intracoastal Waterway, we approached a metal channel marker. We were about a long cast away from it when a fat tripletail came clear out of the water, through a shower of glass minnows and menhaden. John put the fly on the fish, but it took softly as it sunk and the hook didn’t find home. The fish never showed again. As we idled past the marker, we looked down at a tight ball of small menhaden.

None of us could recall ever seeing a tripletail jump that didn’t have a hook in its mouth. I thought about how rare it is to see menhaden here anymore. As if reading my mind, John, who spent most of his life fishing for stripers and blues in New England, said it was just plain nice to see a school of menhaden again.

“Up north, we just don’t get ‘em anymore. Bastards catch ‘em all,” he growled.

Complaints about the dearth of Atlantic menhaden echo throughout the southeast, Mid Atlantic and New England. That’s why, right before the holidays, FLTA encouraged anglers to tell the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to conserve menhaden immediately. The Atlantic population has been reduced, pun intended, to about 10 percent of healthy levels, largely by one company, Omega Protein, which uses giant seines to remove billions of what scientists call the most important fish in the ocean fish from the ecosystem. The fish are ground up at a plant in Reedville, Virginia, and used in a variety of products ranging from dietary supplements to feed for foreign aquaculture.

I attended the historic December 12 ASMFC meeting in Baltimore, along with more than 200 other fishermen and conservation activists. I have been to hundreds of fisheries management meetings, and some of them have really tense. But nothing like this one.

At several points, when it seemed like the ASFMC would cave to political pressure and kick the proverbial can down the road, we had to stand literally over the seated commissioners raising yellow signs saying, “Conserve Menhaden Now.” This after sending more than 120,000 public comments to them with that exact message.

We won a significant reduction in the harvest—25 percent—and many of the commissioners deserve huge credit for standing strong for our marine ecosystems. Still, many of us maintain that 75-percent reduction would have been appropriate, and that number is supported by at least one technical document. But for the first time, the fishery will managed in modern ways, according to the best science, instead of by the industry for the industry. A coast-wide cap was also set on the fishery for the first time.

No scientist I’ve spoken with will say specifically when signs of recovery will appear. But they pointed out that menhaden begin reproducing early in their lives, are quite fecund, and should rebuild fairly quickly. Hopefully, if environmental factors line up, we’ll see big schools of menhaden, and really cool things like a tripletail vaulting through a pod, on a regular basis, within a few years.

Many thanks to all of you for weighing in on this crucial issue for our fisheries.

            --Terry Gibson