Amendment 7 Comment Needed Now; Fishermen's Flea Market This Weekend

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has opened the public comment period on Amendment 7 to the Striped Bass Management Plan — and every angler, whether you fish twice a year on a lark or whether you feed your family by catching striped bass or taking other people to catch striped bass, should go online, or write a letter, or attend one of the public meetings on the matter.

The deadline for public comments is midnight on April 15 — and it’s not your taxes, so if you put it in the mail that night, it won’t count.

Most of you will be looking to offer your comments online, which can be done most easily via email to comments@asmfc.org, and be sure to put the term “Draft Amendment” in the subject line.

If you are the type to write a letter, send it to: Emilie Franke, Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, 1050 N. Highland St., Suite 200A-N, Arlington, VA, 22201.

There will be just one in-person public hearing on Long Island: next Wednesday, March 16, at 6 p.m., in Kings Park, at the State Department of Environmental Conservation offices in Nissequogue River State Park. The address is 123 Kings Park Boulevard, Kings Park, NY 11754, so you can put it into your GPS.

The hearing is only two hours, which, if you know anything about Long Island and fishermen, you’ll realize is going to be a woefully inadequate amount of time for those from the various sectors of the fishing world to say their piece. Those meetings are entertaining and can be educational, but also can be rife with inaccurate information and emotional off-topic ranting.

A couple of things to note when you are preparing your comments. First, this is not a commercial-vs.-recreational fishing issue. The commercial sector for striped bass is a very small segment of the overall take of fish, and there are not proposals in Amendment 7 for any significant changes to how commercial fishing for striped bass is regulated — so save the anti-gillnet rants for another day. They will fall on deaf ears.

Also, your comments will be most effective if you focus on the specific matters at hand in Amendment 7, which is not dealing with specific size and catch limits on fish right now. This is about the overall management plan and how the ASMFC will react with new size and catch limits and other rules in the future.

There are four main issues at hand in Amendment 7: management triggers, what is known as “conservation equivalency,” recreational dead-discards and stock rebuilding.

The actual amendment language is a Plinko game of options and sub-options that will make the average reader go cross-eyed. If you want to wade through it you can do it at asmfc.org (look under the drop-down menus for Management > Striped Bass > Pending Actions for Public Input).

I highly recommend you stay off Facebook when looking for opinions. Too much stupidity on there.

If you are staunchly pro-conservation on this matter, like I am, then the American Saltwater Guides Association gives a pretty good breakdown of the specific options and sub-options that they think are the most responsible way to rebuild the stock and protect it in the future. The Coastal Conservation Association, cca.org, also has formulated a more general overview: ccamd.org, and look for the “Anglers Guide to Draft Amendment 7” link.

Personally, as a sport fisherman who likes to catch and eat striped bass (pulled my last vac-packed November fillet out of the freezer just this morning), I think the most important priority for fisheries management should be making sure that there are more striped bass to catch.

There were a hell of a lot more striped bass in the early 2000s, and the ASMFC and state fisheries agencies straight blew it by not watching the road, plain and simple, and they need to be told loud and clear that they better do whatever it takes to get things back to where they were — and then not screw it up again.

If that means we get to keep fewer striped bass for a while, so be it.

Okay, so here’s a quick primer:

Management triggers are the statistical data sets and thresholds that will dictate to fisheries managers around the coast that there’s a problem with the direction striped bass stocks are headed, and something needs to be changed. Basically, it’s setting the points at which the numbers of fish being caught and killed and the estimated number of spawning fish dictate that it’s time to change the rules.

Management triggers are one of the areas where those with an interest in financial gain alone have tried to weaken the overall Striped Bass Management Plan the most. They have pushed to lower the thresholds and widen the time frames under which the ASMFC must consider tightening rules.

So, with that in mind, the message recreational anglers should be sending to ASMFC is that those thresholds should be very high, and the time frames for reaction should be essentially immediate.

The other area where those who would rather see more dead striped bass than just more striped bass in general is the conservation equivalency allowance in the current management plan. Conservation equivalency is just a euphemism for “loophole,” or “yeah, but.”

In the simplest sense, it gives each of the states under the ASMFC’s purview the option to ditch the coastwide regulations that ASMFC sets and adopt whatever fishing regulations it sees fit, as long as it meets the same quota goals set by ASMFC.

It’s one of those loopholes so common in government regulation that was added with good intent and was immediately bastardized by greed and self-interest. In the striped bass world, it meant New Jersey anglers still being able to kill two fish a day and Maryland anglers being able to kill 18-inch striped bass by the hundreds of thousands.

Conservation equivalency needs a stick to go with its carrot. If a state changes the rules and then goes over its quota because the rules don’t work like they said they would, they should get punished with reduced quota the next year, and no option to try scientific three-card Monte again.

The stock-building framework is a fairly simple matter of how quickly the new amendment will dictate that the ASMFC must react to changing stock assessments. The best option is to demand that they do so immediately and to give them the power to do so administratively in some circumstances, without the usual two-year process that allows lobbyists and political interests to meddle behind the scenes even more than they already do.

Reducing recreational release mortality — the fish we anglers catch and throw back but that still die — is going to be the hardest one to impact, because, really, it is a matter of getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individual anglers to be enlightened to the fact that their ignorant or callous fishing methods and treatment of caught fish are a detriment to the greater good, and to completely change their behavior. If that were an easy thing to do, we could reverse global warming, end water and air pollution, save millions of lives on roads, and lower our health insurance premiums by 70 percent.

Educating anglers is a massive uphill climb, but, really, that’s the crux of the matter.

We can make some incremental improvements through regulations, like the rule adopted in 2020 requiring circle hooks for bait fishing and a new proposal in Amendment 7 to officially outlaw the use of gaffs (that should definitely be something everyone should advocate for). I’d like to see limits placed on the use of treble hooks: Ban double trebles on all lures, require all trebles to be barbless, or just ban the damn things entirely. We anglers will survive if we miss a hit or two because we didn’t have trebles — a lot of fish will, too.

Yes — for all you slot-limit haters out there — allowing big female fish to be kept would reduce dead discards some, no question. And it would be nice to get the stock back to a balanced level that we could return to a simple minimum size limit. But we need to get there first.

Rules work. But, in the end, they aren’t going to be enough on their own. Education has to be doggedly pursued, to teach anglers, one by one, to be more respectful of fish: not stamping their foot on a decked fish to hold it still while a hook is removed; not ripping a hook out of gullet or gill; not kicking a fish back into the water like it was rock on a road; and all the other pointless stupidity the rest of us see daily on the beach or on the water.

That will take a long time, and a major effort by every state, with a lot of money behind it.

Don’t hold your breath.

Tell the ASMFC to get on with helping the fish, and the fishermen will be happy.

See you out there.

The Sag Harbor Fire Department Dive Team’s fishermen’s flea market will return this coming weekend after a two-year hiatus.

The always popular flea market is a great opportunity to find some great deals on tackle, a gem collectible, or just see some of the faces you know from the beaches or docks for the first time in a while.

Doors to the Sag Harbor Firehouse at 1357 Brick Kiln Road will open at 9 a.m. Admission is $5, and all proceeds go to benefit the dive team.

Be there early if you want to find the real scores!