Quote:
Originally Posted by Broad Bill
Fish are here but in tight patches. Find those patches and fish are chewing hard. Great fisherman are crushing it, regular recs are struggling! I agree with Dan but isn't that the red flag? Are party and charter boats crushing it? Just read the reports. If you were fishing in the late eighties you've been fishing long enough to remember what this fishery was like when we had 8 fish bag limits, the entire season was productive and not just the last month and September was off the charts great for two to three weeks every year. Compare that to today's fishery. It's a shadow of what it used to be and quite frankly it's only going to get worse if regulations aren't drastically changed.
This is September. The month for years fish schooled up over wide areas with more fish pouring out of the bays everyday. Best fishing month of the year bar none. Now it's sharpies who can find and work small patches in the hope of landing 3 keepers! What does that say about where this fishery is at?
I know I'm considered a wet blanket here. But I went further with NMFS, ASMFC and MAFMC trying to draw attention to these problems more than anyone else ever has. And with zero support from ASA or any of the more well known recreational fishing organizations. The only person who helped educating and guiding me concerning the process was Dave Daly (Dales529). I post what I do because we're losing this fishery just as many others have been lost. This one because of it's importance will more than sting. The consequences will reverberate throughout the recreational and commercial sectors and shore communities and small businesses will take it on the chin. Imagine a summer without fluke fishing, it can happen no different than a spring without winter flounder and the consequences that caused shore communities and small businesses let alone the recreational sector.
This'll be my final comment on the subject. You can't win if you don't fight and the recreational sector has become so accustomed to losing it's become our mantra. Fishery is in trouble and year in year out management does nothing and all we do is sit around talking about having the highest size minimums and most extended seasons, neither of which will help the sector or health of the stock. It'll actually hurt both.
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Absolutely agree with most of this .
Guys are lazy and give up now as soon as they don’t catch in an hour .
It’s def not the fishing we had ten years ago when our same group would be throwing back 5 pounders by 8 am on a tourney day .
The quality of the fish also isn’t close poundage wise .
Yet I honestly have never caught so many short 13-16” fish than we did this season .
Seems to be a very large body of those age class fish .
But IMO recreational fisherman throwing back anything that the commercial guys can then reap is never going to help the fishery .
IMO if we even didn’t fish an entire season , they would just catch more .
And since recreational fisherman REFUSE to do anything to help their cause , unless something else stops other states commercial fisherman from raping the resource . It’s def going to be another fishery destroyed .
What I don’t understand is why local commercial fisherman are allowing it to happen .
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