Originally Posted by Dave Peros
First off, let me admit up front that I prefer to call myself a "fishing guide" rather than a "charter captain" because my approach to taking folks out is to educate them about fishing and emphasize catch-and-release. I would say of the 125 to 150 trips I take a year, about six to ten fish are kept overall. I might practice strictly catch and release myself when fishing, but there is no place on my boat for browbeating an angler who wants to take a single fish for the table - and hopefully not an exceptionally large female fish that is far more important live than dead.
When I went into business, I elected to go small in terms of my boat and emphasize light tackle casting and fly fishing catch-and-release because I believed that would be a sustainable approach. It is really aggravating to listen to charter captains, who through their "keep the max each and every trip" have contributed to the stock problems we are facing, whine about needing more dead fish to stay in business. I have had some heated discussions with charter captains I know about the double dip of chartering and commercial fishing on the same day and have often wondered what everyone's take is on this being a legal activity in Massachusetts. I make a living through guiding and certainly not a killing, but I have never been able to figure out the logic of captains who say that being able to make an additional buck on commercial days by selling excess fish is necessary, when they are already picking up a pay check for a charter!
It is like "deja vu all over again" when I listen to charter captains, whether it is arguing that there are still plenty of bass out there, they have moved, they are in the EEZ, etc., or that they deserve a bigger share because they are in the business of catching fish. I see their "blindness" mirrored in the complaints offered up by the ground fish fleet that couldn't see beyond the tip of their noses and the dollars in their wallets and now have the audacity to try and blame others for their greed or say there is no problem because they have managed to find a limited aggregation of fish in a small geographical area when there should be fish everywhere. I will agree that the fisheries' management and science has been woefully inadequate and contributed to the problem, but ultimately fishermen are guilty of creating their own messes. We like to romanticize the commercial and charter fisherman, but doing so let's too many of them off the hook for painting themselves in a corner.
I am fortunate to fish each year with anglers who share my values and hopefully will return if they are happy with the "job" I am doing, but if my business is negatively impacted by the greed and short sighted approach of other charter captains, so-called "commercial" striped bass anglers in Massachusetts, and recreational anglers who feel it is OK to kill their limit each and every time they fish, be assured that the government won't be coming to bail me out as they have done with the commercial ground fish fleet. Tackle shops, tackle manufacturers, and other businesses that will suffer if folks can't come and enjoy a healthy, vibrant fishery. But here we are with certain groups of charter captains asking for a "bail out" that isn't an option for anglers who aren't responsible for the mess we are in.
What's saddest for me is to see some of the newer generation of captains here on the Cape posting glory photos on their websites of piles of dead bass, just as it was done in the past. Never in my wildest imagination did I believe we would have made it to this point with striped bass after having gone through the collapse that we saw just three decades ago. I don't hear as well as I once did and I wonder if it is getting worse by the day when I actually hear the same kind of statements that were bandied about during the last collapse.
But here we are again with some folks asking for special dispensation so they can kill more fish and government institutions are doing everything to accommodate them through games such as "conservation equivalency", while casting a blind eye towards what their own technical committee and studies are showing. In the end, I guess it's true what they say: "Insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results."
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