Quote:
Originally Posted by hammer4reel
Tom here are some things for you to research.
Excise tax has already been paid by everyone on every piece of tackle we buy.
That tax comes back into the fishery once you meet it's guidelines.
They give examples of how that money can be used .
As far as manufacture such as Berkley they have way more skin in the game than recs ever will.
All manufactures who are at ICast are members of The American sportfishi ng association.
The ASA is also given a percentage of the sales of every item sold to promote and protect fishing .
That is the organisation each manufacture donates to instead of a thousand different groups asking for money such as SSFFF .
Groups like SSFFF have to ask the ASA for help in those matters .Not each individual tackle maker .
Look at their website and you can find tons of info .
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Dan.....thanks! I'll do just that to better understand the process as it relates to the excise tax funds and state availability as well as ASA. My reference to Berkley was meant in more of a general sense. We need funding for beefed up enforcement and we need funding apparently to have a better lobbying effort for summer flounder and other species for evryone's benefit. My opinion in general stands, the funding of that effort should follow the parties benefitting the most economically from the harvest of those resources. Assuming funds can be raised, next question is how that money is best spent. My biggest issue with how the summer flounder fishery is being mananged is it's not based on the data and NMFS and ASMFC act as if it is.
In fresh water, stocking programs more than anything determine fishery health along with catch levels being managed and protecting the spawn for species which do experience natural reproduction. Salt water is different, most important aspect of fisheries management is making sure natural reproduction outdistances catch every year because the health of every fishery is dependent on it. Purest definition of a sustainable fishery. Yet in the case of summer flounder, we don't protect the spawn even though it's been declining relative to SSB for over 25 years which in my opinion is a major flaw in the philosophy of fisheries management.
First chart is the relationship of egg production to Spawning Stock Biomass "SSB". For ease of reading the green highlighted area is positive, red is not. You can see through around 1997 the relationship changed and started to deteriorate ever since. Meanng we were getting significantly less eggs produced from a higher SSB and that trend has continued from 1997 through today.
Second chart is a different way of looking at the same information. Bars represent egg production or R (recruitment), solid line represents SSB. 1982 thru ~'97 / '98 recruitment was higher than the SSB bar every year, subsequent to '97 / '98 lower every year. It appears on every chart and is a result of what I mentioned in my earlier posts. Size regulations and reduced catch quotas are hurting the fishery, NMFS isn't acknowledging much less addressing the problem (in fact they're '19 regs as mentioned will exacerbate the problem) while Dr. Mark Terceiro, Supervisor, Research Fishery Biologist NMFS
insists the problem with recruitment is a six-year recent anomaly when in fact it's a 25-yr declining trend if not longer no one is addressing.
Third and fourth charts support that 25-yr. decline comparing the ratio of egg production to SSB as well as the decline in the average egg production per metric ton of SSB relative to increased size limits imposed by NMFS. Look at the cross over points, it all changed around '96 / '97 and has been declining since with increase size limits being imposed every year along with the harvest of larger fish by commercial operators and recreational anglers. You can't sustain a fishery where a substantial percentage (probably 95% today) of the annual catch consists of larger sexually mature breeder females and sexually mature larger males, it's not possible in any fishery.
How to get anyone to listen to and acknowledge this is the million dollar question. Instead the Council and Commission says the fishery is stable which couldn't be further from the truth. As soon as we started harvesting more 3 year and older fish and the associated motality accompanying that management philosophy, the bottom dropped out of the fishery by weakening the recruitment strength of SSB.
It's that simple and until addressed.........status quo in regulations is what we can expect as the best case scenario.
