New York Still Getting the Shaft With Black Sea Bass Quotas

Happy New Year, anglers and outdoorsmen.

January in the Northeast should be dubbed Cod History Month to inspire reflection on the decades of disastrous management decisions that have relegated the cod, once the most economically important fish on the planet, to the afterthought column of the fishing world.

Long gone are the days of winter codfishing in the waters of the East Coast that used to be like the Black Friday of the for-hire fishing industry. The anomaly of the 2011 season was but a blip in what is now 30 years of depressed, and depressing, conditions on the cod grounds.

You can read more about this dark bit of not-too-distant fishing history in the May 28, 2024, edition of this column on 27east.com, but I’ll sum it up with a statistic: The current spawning stock of cod is estimated to be at 5 percent of what it needs to be to sustain a healthy fishery.

At the other end of the fish stock spectrum sits the black sea bass. The biomass, as they call the total number of fish of a given species in a region, of black sea bass is a little more than 200 percent of what it needs for what is believed to be a sustainable number of fish and to allow a robust harvest by anglers and commercial fishermen so that we may all enjoy their delicate white fillets.

Because of this, fisheries managers have taken an increasingly hands-off attitude toward black sea bass regulation. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration this month kept black sea bass regulations on par with what they were last year for the 2025 season — even though the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council had recommended a 20 percent reduction.

But that decision means that one of the most glaring inequities in the fishery world will be perpetuated for at least another year.

The recreational quota allotments for New York State anglers will remain barely half what they are for anglers from the neighboring state of New Jersey — an imbalance imparted way back in 1996 that has grown increasingly glaring and galling as New Jersey has flouted adherence to the bounds of regulatory guide rails, while federal regulators seemingly turn the other cheek, because sea bass are generally doing well.

In December, anglers on a Hampton Bays party boat brought their bins of black sea bass to the mates at the cutting table as the captain headed for port, the boat having filled its limit of six fish per man with a minimum size of 16.5 inches each.

But as they steamed northward, they passed the Voyager, a New Jersey-based party boat fishing, as it often does, just a short distance away, also for black sea bass. But the New Jersey anglers, lined up on the rails of the Voyager, were fishing under a 15-fish-per-man bag limit — and they could keep fish as small as 12.5 inches.

This is the world that New York’s party boats must live in as they struggle to fill their decks with anglers presented with declining catches of other prized species like fluke and striped bass.

But on the East End, there is at least a certain captive pool of customers, because it’s a long way to the west for the next available option. For those who operate out of ports close to New York City, however, the inequity is, quite literally, robbing them of business for almost no discernible reason. (The reason is that state sea bass quotas are set according to the apportionment of landings of the species in a baseline year, a common method in setting staggered quotas for a given fishery.)

They have the same fuel bills and the same overhead for boat maintenance and paying their crews, so they can only lower their fares just so much, and are left trying to attract fishermen to their docks, while a dock not much farther away is offering twice the reward for driving south instead of east.

If a state tried to give its farmers a similar advantage in selling milk or grain, they would be blocked by interstate commerce laws. But this inequity is dictated by the federal government, so it is perpetuated year after year after year. The state threatened lawsuits once under then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, but the effort went nowhere, and fishermen are left to simply swallow the bile with each bite of sautéed black sea bass.

The fishery world is beset with logic-bending, stomach-turning wrongdoing like this at almost every turn, and after the decision not to rein in striped bass harvest or fix the glaring wrongs of the black sea bass world, it is looking like things are not going to be much better in 2025.

We’ll save such dreary outlooks for the cold and gray days of Cod History Month. Come the spring, and the arrival of fish on our shores, we’ll look to uplifting hopes for great fishing to come.

Catch ’em up. See you out there.