The Way You See It

… have taken precedence over an entire industry’s health and welfare.

Once their foot was in the door, with the first attempts to regulate the industry starting with closing off fishing grounds, imposing size limits and then quotas, the N.M.F.S. has been rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell and every year brings new and more ridiculous levels of government control, inept management, and downright wrongful closures and restrictions on the Gulf of Mexico Snapper & Grouper Fisheries. I’m not saying that these fisheries don’t need some sort of control. Reasonable regulation imposed in an intelligent manner for real reasons would be easy to work with while making it feasible for families who have relied on fishing as a source of income for years, or in many cases for generations, to continue to do so and to plan on being able to do so for years to come. However, when a government agency is given the amount of control that NMFS has taken on and uses that power in such a heavy handed and misguided fashion as they do, using poor science, bad statistics, and downright untruthful and/or manipulated figures to cater to the greedy or misguided agendas of a very small minority, then the ultimate result is jobless American fishermen, jobless American fishhouse workers, and American restaurant tables with imported fish dinners.

That’s just plain wrong.

We are told as one of the basic tenets of physics that every action has a reaction. It is one of the easiest concepts of elementary physics to grasp. Put another way, to quote Carmela Soprano, “There must be consequenses”. Somehow the people who keep passing and adding regulation after regulation don’t seem to understand it at all, however.

One of the first regulatory actions in the grouper fishery was to close all longline fishing inside an arbitrary line drawn somewhere around 20 fathoms in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and not very close to 50 fathoms west of Cape San Blas Florida. The stated purpose was to protect juvenile grouper and snapper from longliners. Every fisherman who has worked in the Gulf knows that you can catch large red grouper in 30 feet of water and small red grouper in 250 feet of water but, hey, what do fishermen know? Close it down was the plan so close it down they did, never considering the obvious question of “where exactly are all these boats that have historically concentrated their efforts in shallow water going to end up?” Well, go to Longboat Pass just south of Tampa Bay where a fairly large longline fleet used to enter the Gulf fo work the shallow waters off that part of Florida and set sail west. You will get past the arbitrary line drawn somewhere around 20 fathoms and the next obvious feature holding fish that you will come to will be the 40 break. Sure, you will run over lots of patches of hard bottom in 20 to 30 fathoms, but for a fisherman who has never been out that way before, the 40 break is a sitting duck. Holding fish all year round and holding an incredible amount of fish during certain times of the year, it has been the site of many successful fishing trips for hundreds if not thousands of grouper boats over the years. So they push all those shallow water boats out to camp on the forty break…and what do you think the next cry for regulation is? Well, what it was was… “Oh my, the 40 break is being overfished, lets shove all these people out beyond another arbitrary line”.

Well, you simply cannot take a herd of 200 cows grazing happily on 50 acres of land and push them all into a 20 acre plot and expect them to stay happy and have enough grass to graze on. You can’t take a fishing fleet, leave the number of boats participating in the fishery the same and put them into smaller and smaller areas to fish and not expect those areas to end up overstressed. That concept seems simple enough, yet it has successfully eluded all the bright sparks of NMFS for some time.

The continuing and, in fact, growingly inept and downright bumbling and unfair attempts to regulate snapper is another example. Any vertical line fisherman, be it a commercial bandit 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. Even if they did finally relent and admit that all evidence shows that the bycatch reduction devices in the shrimp trawl industry have been successful and snapper are making a huge comback, the large numbers of Florida fishermen who used to bring in a few snapper with their grouper trips for a welcome boost in total catch value would still be forced to discard thousands of snappers, many of them with no chance to survive, because the pie has already been cut up and served, IFQ shares are already allotted, many of them to fish buyers, not fish catchers.

And yes, I’ve heard from GFA and know they would have us all believe that IFQ’s will be a panacea for all fisheries and an IFQ system being considered for the grouper fishery would supposedly somehow “heal” all of this. I’ve been offered the all expense paid trip to the crossroads, err, British Columbia, in order to view how a similar program has made a foreign fishing fleet happy and contented enough to be paraded before us as a shining example of successful fishery management. Never mind the fact that the situation in BC never was and never will be anything like the situation in the Gulf of Mexico. The trouble is, I also know that the current IFQ system for snapper is part of the large scale problem, no a solution. The fleet of snapper boats in the north and west Gulf of Mexico are now all free to go target deep-water grouper at the beginning of the year while keeping their snapper quota in reserve for after they have been a big help closing down the deep-water grouper fishery and the golden tile fishery much earlier than they ever were before. I keep meaning to thank those who take credit for that program (EDF would have you believe it is all because of them) for the six months of idle time my own boat has had for the last few years while the segment of the grouper fishery it was built and geared up to target are closed.

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 suggestion of what to me seems a logical conclusion that if a fleet can catch that much more than the quota in the allotted time frame then obviously there are MORE OF THE FISH out there than they thought or claimed. 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 spawning, 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 2006 and 2007, 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. Perhaps I had the same guy on the phone this year when NMFS announced that the deepwater grouper fishery and the golden tile fishery would be closed on the same day, May 10, a full three weeks earlier than the previous year. When I asked him how two fisheries managed with different quotas happened to be closing on the same day he replied that “coincidentally, they (the quotas) will both be reached within a day or two of each other so we are closing them on the same day to avoid confusion.” We used to call saleable bycatch “incidental catch”. NMFS has pretty much done away with that and relegated all non-targeted catch to trash fish to be thrown back, but they have replaced “Incidental catch” with “coincidental catch”. Nice of them.

Last year, shallow water grouper fishing production suffered from a number of factors, not the least of which was the fact that all the boats that would normally be fishing in deep water and that could not afford to just stop fishing were fishing for red and black grouper from late June onward. Coupled with this increased pressure, we had no major storms in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico this past summer. A hurricane or two, or at least a tropical storm, stirs up and moves around the fish making fishing improve for everyone. The combined result of the mismanagement of the deep water fishery and the current slump in shallow water production was that a whole slew of boats who had never participated in the deep water fishery were 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 mattered was the fishery had now opened for what everyone knew would likely be a short period so off goes a fishing fleet to hurry up and catch the deep water quota, even faster than last year, so everyone returned to targetting red grouper even earlier this year than they did last summer. Once again a fishing fleet was put into additional and unnecessary danger while a fishery was 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 monitoring 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 was 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 approved for the program prior to the deadline for having them installed, this despite the fact that there were 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 basic 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.

The author is the owner/operator of a commercial fishing boat which used to operate in the longline shark and grouper fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico and which is now operating in the grouper fishery as a bandit boat.

Tags: Government Regulation, Ranting general // 1 Comment »