Jack Ciattarelli Stance on NJ Outdoors

[hammer4reel]

[QUOTE=NoLimit;590900]

Originally Posted by Broad Bill

Salt water quotas are set through a collaborative process between the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC), NMFS (NOAA Fisheries) and ASMFC. ASMFC and MAFMC develops and recommends fishery management plans (FMPs) and quota specifications based on scientific advice provided by North East Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC), while NMFS approves and implements these regulations to ensure they prevent overfishing if you can believe that”

How can this be believed? In the case of fluke, they are killing the breeders and letting all the males die of old age. But we are being told not to believe our lying eyes. The whole system is tainted and needs to be fixed.

Our catch isn’t doing shit to hurt the fluke fishery . Smoke and mirrors .
Fluke fishery is being destroyed by the NC commercial fleet from NC past Massachusetts.
While everyone else gets the blame passed to them , the landings for those 7 days boats way exceeds their fishery .
So they hit everyone else’s waters outside the 3 mile line and take them back to the NC processing plants .

.unless that stops , which it won’t everything else don’t mean crap

.

[Broad Bill]

It goes beyond just the NC commercial fleet which I agree is a huge problem. The entire commercial fleet from every state fishing year round and killing females during the offshore fall migration and spawn kills trillions of eggs every year and recreational shorts tossed back overboard to retain higher priced larger fish of both sexes but primarily females. Commercial dead discard levels are enormous and as I've been saying for almost 10 years will eventually be the death of the stock. North Carolina and Virginia I believe make up about 50% of the entire commercial quota so North Carolina's practice harvesting their quota primarily during the fall and winter months is a huge problem but the entire commercial practice is absolutely f****** out of control.

And yes I agree recreational fishing doesn't put a dent in the fishery and isn't the problem. The fluke fishery has been dedicated to the commercial sector and the regulations are absolutely ludicrous targeting exclusively the harvest of the spawning biomass while killing millions of juvenile fish.

[NoLimit]

So why keep the minimum size and ruin the day for the kids that go home after tossing back all their fish?

[Broad Bill]

Originally Posted by NoLimit

So why keep the minimum size and ruin the day for the kids that go home after tossing back all their fish?

The recreational minimum size was adopted to insure a much greater percentage of the overall stock became the exclusive harvest of the commercial sector as their minimum starts at 14". They still harvest the larger fish to promote higher catch values and kill God only knows how many smaller fish in the process. The recreational sector makes the sacrifices, the commercial sector receives the financial benefits and an extremely high percentage of the stock becomes collateral damage in the commercial sector process of selectively harvesting the more valuable older age classes. Meaning smaller less valuable younger age classes brought up in their nets get shoveled back overboard dead with the rest of the non targeted catch. There's more waste in commercial fishing alone than the entirety of all recreational harvest but fisheries management bases commercial catch numbers for dead discard mortality on bogus data that commercial operators routinely under report on their vessel trip reports which is completely based on the honor system and whatever percentage they arbitrarily want to report which you know is low balled.

Recreational catch statistics, as we know, are based on MRIP numbers which NMFS has already admitted are more than 40% overstated while commercial discard mortality statistics are left up to the discretion of commercial operators. It's a completely rigged system that favors the commercial sector at the expense of the recreational sector and the stock as a whole.

[NoLimit]

Maybe our only hope is to invest in artificial fish, just like artificial meat. . Most of what is in the supermarket is half way there like sea legs.. The supermarket will squirt out 50 different flavors of fish sticks. The trawlers will quit tearing up the seabed, stop by catching the juveniles to death, and processing fillets that taste like cardboard. This way, we can get back to the days when there was no limit and plenty of quality fish for the table.