No Fluke,

Do you think those two fluke / flounder sticking out of the net in the picture we're factored into the commercial harvest counts! While it makes sense to believe climate change and warming oceans around the world are having an impact on migratory patterns of certain fish stocks, I think it pales in comparison to the impact commercial over harvest is having on every fishery where they maintain a presence. Within the last few years, we've had some of the coldest winters in recent history and still very few mackerel to show for it. Wasn't it a few years ago where Sandy Hook almost completely froze up during the winter or actually did. The winter fishery in the New York Bight with ling, whiting, cod and mackerel was without rival back in the day. People who aren't old enough to have experienced it will never have a true sense of how incredible those fisheries were, Stocks were healthy year in year out and then they collapsed because of domestic and foreign commercial pressure. It was wiped out within a few years and has never rebounded,

“We used to come right here and catch two, three, four thousand pounds a day, sometimes 10,” he said, sitting at the wheel of the Proud Mary — a 44-footer named, he said, after his wife, not the Creedence Clearwater Revival song — as it cruised out to sea.

10,000 lbs of whiting a day for one 44 ft trawler. And that's what he brought back to the dock, how many whiting and discard were killed in attaining that catch. I remember the years when acre after acre of dead ling and whiting littered the surface of the Mud Hole after the trawlers were done for the day, a cataclysmic waste of the resource. Climate change will move bodies of fish over a period of time, indiscriminate and excessive netting will kill it overnight.