U guys make nice martyrs.
Guys have been taking Herring for bait about as long as i been alive.
A rec.herring fishery closer is useless with out a concurrent closer by the comm.s
Another case where the recreational fisherman has to tke the hit because a fishery is being overrun by greedy goverment subsidized commercial fishin fleets.Who basically have no regaurds but the almighty dollar.They have been doin it for yrs.There's a long list of usta be species.Its all about maximum yeild.Good luck tryin to change anything as they are major contributors to a goverment run by greed.Just say goodby an get used to it.
Now I expect some friend of a commercial fisherman will say I don't know what i'm talkin bout or its the seals or somethin.Or I am insensitive to the plight of the romantic art of the fisherman.Ya i cried watchin the perfect storm.Take a look at how successful the commercial ban on netting mullet has been for the state of florida.
The goverment simply stopped dumping money into a tired old american industry an bought em out.Florida went from a dead see to a fishermans dream.I really don't know why we can't do the same.A farmraised fish talapia is quickly becoming one of the worlds favorite.More should be done in this type of fishin or we will soon have nothing left.

Remember those 3 mile slicks behind the boat out the bay when it was in East Passage? The seals used to pile up on citing rock off Rose Island. Haven't seen them that thick since it left.

Those trawlers are the pariahs of the oceans though.Wish they would make the entire commercial fishery go back to hand gear and vessels under 65 feet. There are enough farm raised fish out there to supply the world's fish needs. With Tilapia now available, which is a 98% vegetarian(that means no fish are killed to feed these fish, unlike other fisheries which kill roughly 3-4 fish to raise 1 adult food fish)
fish, they could use them for fish meal and oil to rear the other more desirable fish. Hell, the Japanese are now farming Mahi-Mahi and pen rearing Bluefin tuna quite successfully, along with zillions of shellfish and shrimp.
A hand gear only i.e rod and reel, hand line, or harpoon only, no nets over 10 feet in diameter, no pots over 5 on trawls, etc. fishery could support many a bayman again and supply the local markets with fresh fish as well as domestic and international trade with gourmet and high end restaraunts. The price would remain at a premium, facilitating a healthier marine economy as well as pay base for the fisherman and their families. It would also create a safer commercial fishery, enabling the entire fleet to fish closer to home and under better weather by relieving the incredible pressure that large scale commercial operations place on the environment. Not to mention our by kill of many fish discarded when non discriminatory practices are prevalent.
If we really want to change for the better, IMHO thats the only way to go. Don't threaten to cut them off entirely, only force them to micro size and change their ways......

Were you lookin over my shoulder NIB??? :hihi: seriously though, my point above about closing the harvest in the streams is simply to allow the few remaining out there to SPAWN, They cant do it if they cant get back to the stream. Of course commercial fishing needs to be addressed, and soon, but irresponsible taking of a not so important baitfish by recreational fisherman is just plain stupid. There are too many alternative baits both natural and man made that work wonders on the game fish we seek. Do you think it is co-incidence that so many "great" fisherman continually put massive fish on the beach or boat with artificials??? There are so many effective baits out there that it should be easy to switch. Adaptation is the key to mans ingenuity, and most great fisherman adapt.
Our biggest problem as humans in regards to the environment is that we feel the fate of the earth, along with its "other" inhabitants is different from that of ours as humans. It' s not. By helping troubled species all along the food chain when we can, we better help our fate, period.

Shutting down the runs is the only resp[onsible thing to do. Go buy some nice pearl colored slug gos in 9 inch, some storm shads in same size plus 6 inch, a few needlefish plugs, and some nice Pt. Jude tins and eel imitators, and youve done your part to relieve the pressure on 3 different troubled bait species; herring, bunker, and eels. Youve also pumped money into the local retail economy, have caught a few nice fish if your using said lures properly in th eright conditions, and you can look and the mirror and ignore the ugly face you see cuz you dun your good deed for the day, samaritan.:buds:

Hey I'm a responsible sporstman.I agree wit shutting it down if i thought it might do something.It's really not gonna make a difference. lets see em(comms) make the the same sacrifices for the fishery.

Just because they wont do their part, doesnt mean we cant do ours. If 50k go in the Bournedale run again, and spawn, then 4 years from now there will be spawning age adults from that same Bournedale run or whatever run you insert. By protecting the spawn, you protect the current stock with same commercial pressures. its basic math. The protection of spawns in all species can result in increasing the populations of these animals. The same problem is happening in reverse with eels. The adults go BACK to sea to spawn, yet we harvest them prior to that in freshwater before they can spawn. We harvest the herring before they make it to their freshwater to do the same. Notice a trend?

I disagree that you not taking your 600 or so will make an impact. Look what they did with just 2 mating pairs of ospreys in the Westport river system. Just 2 mating pairs and 12-15 years later over 500 mating pairs along the surrounding river and bay systems.

If we shut down the runs, we allow the healthy, strong, hoprny fish to get in the pond and have at it layin eggs and shootin milt. 600 here, 6000 there adds up, all about the math.....

:lurk: till morning :buds:

AFAIK there is no commercial fishery for blueback herring.

[QUOTE=squiddler] There are trawlers all over the New England waters, all year round, netting the sea herring by the thousands of pounds, and they dock in local piers, and sell their catch to the highest bidder, just like every other fishery known to American man so to speak. The bulk of herring caught are not used as bait, except in chum and oil as they are a delicate fish and lots of "chuff" by-product comes from the procccesing plants to provide plenty for this purpose. Herring does not freeze all that well, thats why you don't see it in flats like many other bait sized fish are. QUOTE]

When I fished out of Montauk we used to buy frozen flats of sea herring for bait all the time.

Pen raising saltwater fish has its own problems.As has already been shown with farm raising salmon these fish by virtue of being raised in pens are genetically inferior to their wild counterparts.

These fish have been known to escape in enough numbers and interbreed with wild populations and introduce their infererior genentics into the general population.This can cause a host of problems mainly which is the newborn fish are prone to disease.

Don't get me wrong farm raising fish is a good thing but its techniques need to be vastly improved.

Obviously fish farm raised soley in self contained freshwater ponds don't apply.

You can't change a pickel back into a cucumber. The fish wholesale industry has aggressively marketed over the last 10-20 years to establish new domestic and foreign markets. A quaint, smallboat, "bayman" type fishery would never be able to supply today's demand. Since demand would far outstrip supply, prices would skyrocket. Maybe the doulbled, tripled, or even quadrupled prices would be enough to convince the dealers, proccessors, and wholesalers that they'll still be able to maintain thier very comfortable lifestyles despite a downsized fishery.
Many nations place little or no restrictions on thier fishing fleets, despite heavy international pressure to do so. Unilateral action by 1 or 2 countries will never be effective.
Unfortunately there is no easy answer. Days-at sea regulations only show limited success. Boat buy-back programs have been uneven at best and a ludicrous waste of taxpayer dollars at worse (case in point: US gave subsidized loans to boat owners in the 70's to build more, bigger, more powerfull scallop boats, then offered to buy them back in the late eighties/early ninties to reduce fishing pressure).
Round & round we go... where it stops....

:hs:

Pen raised fish are genetically identical to their wild counterparts, because they are taken from wild stocks, corralled into floating pens, and fed at a super rate to yield large fish quickly. That is why you do not see crazy prices like you used to for Bluefin tuna, as the Japanese(who drive the main demand anyway) can control the market much better. You just don't see single fish fetching those 20,000 plus price tags anymore.

Farm raised fish do have their basic problems, but the Chinese have been farming fish successfully for over 2000 years. They can rear 4 different types of freshwater fish in the same pond, all benefitting each other and the environment.

In regards to Salmon farming, it is an industry that needs major improvement, I will agree. These fish are often times raised solely in fresh water farms like you mentioned, but they can and do escape even these, breeding with native stocks etc. and also polluting the hell out of the surrounding lands.
Yet shellfish farms and pen reared fish do not have these problems you mentioned above, as they use natural stocks and tidal areas to keep the water clean and healthy.

What is AFAIK ?

Is there a commercial fishery for ATLANTIC SEA HERRING?
I guess what ur tell me its the rec.fisherman takin to many.not the bycatch._Please.Where are the American Shad.They all swim the same basic waters.net em up put em in a can they all taste the same pickled.

saw them there a few days ago.

golf cant even be compared to fishing or hunting,golf is boring!!!

i think its a mix of non U.S. and U.S. comercial fishing and river herring mixing with sea herring and also alot of poaching at night at the herring runs. my grandfather tells me how the russian trawlers would come in and it seemed like they would scoop up everything in the god damn ocean,my grampa hates those bastards and people that hurt the ecosystem.my grandfather would watch the herrings runs like a hawk back in the day and report them or take matters into his own hands

everyday the bucket goes to the well

one day the bottoms gonna drop out

AFAIK=As far as I know.

Yes there is a commercial fishery for both sea herring and shad. NMFS says that by catch of river herring in the sea herring fishery is minimal. By catch of river herring in the shad fishey could be a problem, but I think the commercial shad fishery in New England is mostly gone now.

FWIW, I lived on the Palmer River in Rehoboth most of my life, walking distance to the herring run and shad fishing areas. I moved South to Newport this year, but prior to that I've always had a REAL good sense of both the shad run and the herring runs on the river both because I fished it constantly and because I was a herring officer for the town for several years. So since I'm 28, we'll say I have a good 18 years or so of unscientific data in my head. The Palmer supports, as far as I know, the only American shad run in Narragansett Bay. IMO the size and quantity of those fish is as good as it ever was, maybe better. Yet the herring (both bluebacks and alewifes) are almost gone. You can stare at the ladder and the waterfall for hours and see nothing.

Not sure what the point of this is or what it indicates if anything, but it certainly supports the idea that there is little to no American Shad fishery if it is clearly healthy, at least in that river. If the shad were falling victim to the same sort of commercial fishing the herring are, I would be very aware of it.

The Shad run on the Merrimack, which was second in size only to Connecticut only 10 years ago has been going down hill steadily since then and is a matter of serious concern to MDMF

The classic Shad run on the Delaware is nothing like it used to be.

Tribal Herring
 

At least the Vanderhoops on the Vineyard will have herring. Tribal spawning areas like menemsha do not fall under the ban. They'll be going off island every day business as usual selling to all the shops.

According to the original posting: "At a November 9, 2005business meeting, the Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission (MFAC) approved several Division of Marine Fisheries (MarineFisheries) proposals including a two-year seasonal cod prohibition in a portion of Massachusetts Bay and a three-year moratorium on the harvest, possession, and sale of river herring."

If that wording is correct, the indians won't have any shops to sell to.

Thats what they say, but they don't have the science to prove it. They only have observers on 2-3% of the vessels. That is not a respresentative sample. You couldn't go down to the ramp, ask 2-3 out of 100 fishermen what they caught and then multiply their catch rate by the other 97 fishermen. The NMFS admits that they need more observers, and they asked for a pile of money to do it last year. I don't know if they got the funding. I am guessing its a low priority.

Exactly.
There have been several herring management/ban threads posted over the last couple of months, and in every one, someone mentions that people from a state with a ban will take herring in a state that doesn't have one, or mentions the Native American Indian exemption issue. What sometimes seems to be missed is the fact that even if a person obtains herring legally in one state, it would still be illegal to possess that fish in a state With a ban. I think one problem is that poachers, by thier very nature, ignore/violate bans, laws, rules, and regs, and are willing to do things like take herring illegally, or possess short scup in the livewell. I will certainly obey any and all such regs, first, because I don't want to face the consequences, but also because it should improve the resource down the road.

2-3% can be a statistically valid sample, what percentage of the voting public do you think those presidential polls use? A small sample increases the margin for error (standard deviation) but even with a 2-3% sampling rate, all else being equal (i.e. times of year, fishing areas, etc) their current statistics do indicate little bycatch in the sea herring fishery. I'm not saying that figures are gospel, but even if they were double, it would indicate little bycatch in the sea herring fishery.

First it was menhaden, now herring & eels . . . .

Last summer I successfully livelined white perch I caught in a local pond. Thank god soft plastics can't be overfished!

I was wondering about bluegills.......:cool:

Seems to me if the fish are there, the BG's won't have to be in the water that long before they are inhaled there fore hardiness should'nt be a problem.

It would be interesting to see which are hardier. It would stand to reason white perch w/b because they are andromonous. I am sure white perch are also natural prey for migrating stripers at times. Their shape and color more closely resemble herring, pogies, scup or shad.

I clipped the dorsal on mine; not that a decent bass would have any trouble inhaling it. I would assume chunking these would also prove effective and easy on the wallet.

If you have ever tasted WP caught fresh you might not waste them on an inferior tasting fish such as striped bass. I tend to shy away from fresh water fish no matter where they are taken.

As with any larger bait, you would need a good high capacity bait well with aeration. Culling these panfish generally improves our fresh water fisheries as well.

Leave those herring alone for a few years!!!

restoring a herring run
 

I just moved closer to scituate herring brook -- thats right "HERRING" brook. There is even a fish ladder leading into the reservoir.

I have never seen fish go over it.
I have checked at all times of day over tha last years.
I have seen a handful of herring pulled out of the river/brook by birds and I even cought one on a two springs ago.

I would like to clean it out and rejuvinate it.
any suggestions for first steps?

Mike, you might want to contact these folks http://www.nsrwa.org/programs/third_herring_brook.asp

And contact Ma DMF here http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dmf/progr...htm#anadromous

well if they are closing off the runs, they should tell the russians in Gloucester harbor to take a hike and let all of them replenish. I just hate when its one thing for someone and something else for another.

my .02 is that there are some shortages. Behind my parents house there is a run and last year I only saw maybe a dozen fish. When I was a kid, thousands.........

Herring boats
 

If I did this right these are some of the many boats raping the herring and macks from ower sea.

Herring boats 2
 

More of the same

I've got an idea,,, lets all just give up fishing for bass and take up sewing or knitting hehehehe,,, just kidding,,, either way,us fishermen are screwed,,, the fish stocks are declining no matter what we do about it! it sucks!