Quote:
Originally Posted by Broad Bill
Captain your reports are always truthful, good or bad. We all appreciate your honesty. I know the south wind and cold water has been a major problem this year. My concern which I've been voicing for years and I know a lot of people agree with is that the regulations have targeted the harvest of large breeders in this fishery by both the recreational and commercial sectors. If there's that many shorts around that are relatively active even with these cold waters there should be an equal amount of larger fish around active in the same waters or shallower and there's not. I'm hoping the winds change and things improve drastically for the better but my concern is that all the years of harvesting big fish by these ridiculous regulations are coming back to roost and have taken their toll on the older age classes which drive recruitment down and has this fishery in a spiral. I hope I'm wrong but the data and common sense says I'm right. I hope for party boat captains like yourself, charter boat operators and recreational fishermen as well as commercial operators this turns around but I think what we're seeing is a significant erosion in the population of the stock which is why substantial reductions were made this year. NMFS knows it and are trying to figure out a way to change the trajectory of this fishery while not admitting that their policies and practices over the past two decades have been atrocious and caused these declines. Mark Terceiro has been wrong all along about why recruitment levels have been down for 10 years. ASMFC and MAFMC have been wrong about how the fishery is being managed and how harvesting older age class fish is the best way to manage the stock. That's an absolutely insane philosophy when you consider the consequences of that statement and amount of waste involved in the practice of selective harvest by the commercial sector. And more than anyone else, NMFS has allowed this fishery to decline without any change in management ideology since 2004 which is criminal.
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Approx a dozen draggers been working around Shark river spots for going on 3 weeks .Those boats are filling their quotas weekly (1500 # each )
So the fish are here , difference is they don’t need them to bite .
.very few fish being caught by recreational fisherman in the same area
