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Copied and pasted from another site:
On the other hand, we do have a way to get away from anecdotal evidence and look at more objective information, and that's the NMFS trawl survey that is conducted each fall. I just got a copy of the results of the 2010 survey yesterday. If bass were offshore, as we hear, they should be showing up in greater numbers at the appropriate sampling sites. It's not happening. There was one huge catch in a single sample--and that was about 2 1/2 miles off Fire Island, and coincided with the big sand eel bite that occurred there last fall. Otherwise, bass in the near-offshore samples were scattered and few, as one would expect if the fish were not offshore in significant numbers, except for certain hotspots of local abundance. Also, when the trawl fishery for bass was being debated at MRAC, the trawler captains assured us, without exception, that once they used up their tags, they could essentially avoid catching bass as bycatch mearely by moving off the beach, because there were very ferw fish out there. In order to believe that the bass really are out in deep water, we'd have to assume that the trawlers were commenting in bad faith before MRAC in order to influence the adoption of a regulatilon that they favored, and I know that a lot of people would object if we accused them of being dishonest about such a thing...
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