This post is not to bitch about cmms or recs or our reps on the committees , etc. I think everyone is doing their best and its no good to point fingers and argue amongst ourselve.
What I want to comment on is the validity of the numbers that the surveyors get.
I used to be all over from the CT breachway to Napatree back when I used to get the oversand permit. I spent a lot of time down there and I also cruised all the beaches from Ninigret to Misquamicut (actually decided to delete some of the places we fished , both for our own good and for the good of the spots
) Anyway , we put our time in.
One weekend I was down there with my friend Chris who also used to come up all the time. Now we were into everything from eels to pogie heads , every lure under the sun , all the odball stuff like balloons , hooking the eels in the tail got tried and real good stugg like rigging them etc , we worked hard and listened while at the tackle shops , etc. We did as well as anybody was doing out there. Well one weekend we were there the whole weekend round the clock. We caught almost nothing. We also had lots of friends who were serious fisherman and would ask how they did and did they see anyone else catching , etc , etc. the whole point is that weekend , all the regular fisherman who were there all day and all night caught sqwat. Well Sunday morning about 8 AM , we were standing near the truck drinking our morning coffee and a surveyor came along. He asked us about our catch that weekend , how often we went , etc , etc. We told him we fished all the time and knew the whole game but we caught sqwat that whole weekend. He thanked us and indicated it was nice to get an honest answere from some guys who obviously fished a lot and were not screwing up his survey by lying about fish we didn't get.
Well then he goes over to this bunch of guys who had been showing up mid morning for the weekend , mostly tangling everyones lines and talking more than fishing. These guys could not catch a fish unless the typical monster blitz came drifting by and they just happened to hit a fish in the head with a multi treble hooked popper. So we listen as these know nothings , catch nothings, start telling the surveyor about how they each caught a dozen fish every day all weekend. Now we were there and we saw these guys fishing every morning and they got zip. No way , even if they fished 10 more weekends , they were not going to catch anything at all.
So now the surveyor has interviewed 6 guys total (me , Chris and these 4 fishless wonders) , 2 say almost nothing caught , 4 say they got 48 fish a day between them , and did that each day .
So now these six interviews get worked by the statistics of how many guys , say 100 in the general area , times an average of 8 fish per guy (Their lied about 48 divided by the 6 total fisherman) so the end product of the survey would show that based on a statistical sampling , there were 800 fish caught per 100 people fishing. Now maybe they estimate a 1000 fisherman along the whole coast that weekend so now the lied about 48 fish ends up about 8000 recreational fish caught in the quota calculations that weekend based on the surveys.
Now I'm not complaining about the surveyor as he was doing his best , etc , etc. The fact is that recreational catch totals are based on interviews and surveys and estimates. The baseline data around which all the estimates and statistics rely upon are info from fisherman who as a whole lie through their teeth about how many and how big they caught.
So anyway , the rec numbers are based on surveys that gather info from lying SOB's.
So i agree with the ASMFC tech committee that rec numbers are overestimated by 50%. Now what that does to the overall picture , I don't know.
I did see a guy on the cable the other night on Cox Channel 15 who had all kinds of data on fin and shelfish and historical comparisons and the decline of lobsters and the rise of crabs and the way the catch followed but lagged the biomass data by a couple of years , etc. Worth watching so maybe check your listing to see if they replay that 9they often do). His stats on the bass was that we had a miraculous recovery but that things were trending downward again and he hoped the committees would reduce the catch before the striper stock collapsed again rather than wait until after it happened.
1 fish a day for recs , I don't really care what size it is. I think size has offsetting effects. Allow lower you lose more fish , allow higher you lose better breeders. So that's why I say 1 fish , let the experts decide on size.