Striper Talk Striped Bass Fishing, Surfcasting, Boating - The Ocean Conservancy hard at work in NY

The Ocean Conservancy hard at work in NY:

At the bottom of this message, there are some selected quotes from a NY Times article regarding two competing bills in New York regarding MPAs. The full text may be found at...

http://www.nytimes.com/2003....sition=

I found the following quote by the Ocean Conservancy to be the most interesting...

"In terrestrial management, 5 percent of our land is in wilderness. We don't have the equivalent in the oceans."

Don't be fooled when environmentalist groups make this claim. The truth is that the Ocean Conservancy has no interest in the TRUE "equivalent" of the land based model used for National parks and wilderness. Why? Because land based wilderness and national parks do in fact allow fishing.

There is a fellow named Ted Williams who has written extensively on this subject. He is quoted in this NY Times article and in the past he has been gracious enough to allow me to reprint some of his work. This is a quote from his piece called "Marketing MPAs" where Ted clarifies the matter of fishing in national parks and wilderness...

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Ted Williams wrote:

It's hard to educate people in a miasma of white noise. And now comes the Ocean Conservancy.

"Ocean wilderness will allow fishing, won't it?" I asked the Conservancy's Greg Helms, who is heading an initiative to convert almost 25 percent of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off Los Angeles to ocean wilderness.

"Oh no," he said. "You won't be able to fish." I inquired about no-kill fishing for pelagics that don't stay in MPAs anyway. "Not that either," he said. "You can dive it; you can surf it; but there's no catch-and-release fishing. You can't do that with native fish in national parks or wilderness areas." "You can't?" I intoned, scarcely believing my ears.

"No," he said. "Generally speaking, you can fish for fish that are placed there using user fees for the specific purpose of fishing them. But you can't harm an indigenous natural resource." That, of course, is incorrect. Non-indigenous fish are not stocked in national parks or wilderness areas, and catch-and-release fishing as well as catch-and-kill fishing is legal in both.
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The full text of the "Marketing MPAs" article may be found at the link below. It is a good primer for anyone interested in learning more about Marine Protected Areas. However, Ted's style takes some getting used to. He covers a lot of different angles and he offers many opinions that you may or may not agree with. So don't be surprised when you read phrases like "America has about 300 MPAs, and we're desperately in need of more..." You need to read the whole article to get where he is coming from (not all MPAs are permanently closed to fishing). I may not agree with everything that Ted expresses, but I do respect his writings because he really does his homework. Please note that Ted's article was written before the Channel Islands marine reserve in California was written into law (now permanently closed to fishing).

http://www.basspond.com/articles/gen...out_mpas.shtml

Best,
Mike Flaherty
BassPond.Com

{NY TIMES article quotes follow...}

Quote:

Broadly, an M.P.A. is a designated area of ocean that is subject to user
restrictions as diverse as boating speed limits, prohibitions against
picking coral, and curbs on bag limits and certain fishing techniques. The
United States has over 300 M.P.A.s, and almost all users - including
anglers - embrace them as useful conservation tools.

But some M.P.A.'s, generally known as reserves, prohibit all fishing
outright, for reasons ranging from a paucity of fish stocks to the desire to
eliminate all extractive or intrusive human activities. Reserve-style
M.P.A.'s have become a flash point, with anglers fearing that some
environmental groups have slipped into the costumes of sheep to do the work
of wolves, attacking the national tradition of virtually unrestricted public
access to marine fishing. In reserves, even catch-and-release angling with
its negligible mortality rate is forbidden.
...

The spark that ignited the controversy over M.P.A.'s was struck in the
Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off Santa Barbara, Calif. In 2002,
California created no-fishing reserves that include about 20 percent of the
900 square miles of sanctuary that falls under the state's jurisdiction
because of the threat posed by overfishing to a number of sedentary,
bottom-dwelling species, including cowcod and rockfish. These fish are not
helped by catch-and-release regulations, because the act of reeling them up
through 200 feet of water kills them.

But large numbers of highly desirable, migratory game fish including
yellowtail and wahoo freely roam the surface layer in reserve waters, where
they can be caught using techniques so unrelated to fishing for
bottom-dwellers that there is no incidental by-catch of the threatened
species at all. Yet fishing for the free-ranging species is still forbidden.
While the one-size-fits-all policy makes regulation and enforcement of
reserve laws easier, it also highlights complex problems embedded in the
reserve approach.

"A big part of this problem is that many environmentalists don't talk to
fishermen and don't understand fish," Ted Williams, a conservation writer,
said. "But they hate being called stupid, so now they're at least engaging
people on this issue."

...

Mostly, user-based conservation groups rely on the twin mantras: "It's all
about the management" and "Let the science decide." They argue that if
lawmakers and federal and state fisheries managers applied themselves, the
problems of overfishing could be solved in a heartbeat without eliminating
or significantly restricting recreational fishing. For example,
bottom-trawling (the technique that is to the ocean what clear-cutting is to
forest) remains one of the most common commercial fishing techniques,
despite the great damage it causes.
"We could solve 90 percent of the fish stock problems instantly by
eliminating bottom-trawling," Rip Cunningham, editor of Salt Water
Sportsman, said. "I have no problem with M.P.A.s. I learned to fish in one -
Buzzards Bay, near Rhode Island.

...

"There's a whole ethic we need to instill here," said Greg Helms, a Channel
Islands program manager for the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group at
the forefront of the movement to create reserve M.P.A.'s. "We need to have
these places just for themselves. We also have growing numbers of people who
want to see fish and other marine animals in a natural state. These people
deserve a place at the table, too. In terrestrial management, 5 percent of
our land is in wilderness. We don't have the equivalent in the oceans."

Advocates for recreational user groups dismiss that argument on the grounds
that wilderness areas generally are open for camping, hiking, hunting and
fishing, and that sportsmen dating back to President Theodore Roosevelt have
spearheaded the drive to protect and appreciate wilderness. And they are
disturbed by the injection of ethical and philosophical positions into a
debate that, they say, should be driven and decided by science.

Speaking for most anglers, Cunningham said, "We believe that just because
you believe something philosophically, that's not quite enough to keep the
public out of a public resource."