What Just Happened with Seabass

[Gerry Zagorski]

As most know, according to fisheries management's own stock assessments, Seabass stocks are totally rebuilt and have been for a many years now... That is due in part to the very conservative regulations we've suffered through in the past. Based on this, you'd think we'd be rewarded with a liberalization but instead, we're staring down the barrel of a 20% reduction. That reduction was initially supposed to be 28% so I guess we're supposed to be happy it only turned out to be 20%??

So what happened here? This reduction is a direct result of the current framework of how fisheries are managed. Instead of taking into account the overall long term health of the fishery, part of which is indicated by stock assessments, they use the short term landing data from the prior year to determine the flowing years quotas. In this case, the 2021 landing data was abnormally high which meant we caught more fish then we should have so they slammed on the breaks for 2022.

Not sure how the 2022 regs are going shake out but in order to meet our reduction, I'm fairly certain we're looking at a lower bag limit, a higher minimum length, a shorter season or a combination of all the above.

Stay tuned here so when the time comes we're prepared to give public comment on which of the options our state will be forced to choose from which will likely happen in late March or April.

In the mean time lets hope some progress can be made with Fisheries Reform which will give the federal managers some other factors to manage fisheries with a more long term view.