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Prince,
I'm not denying the food component to commercial fishing. I think it would be awful for the bass to be reduced to living as a farm raised species, effectively extinct in the wild. Merely pointing out that full-time industrial scale striped bass fishing, as an industry, is (for all intents and purposes) dead. No matter what brilliant management plan is created, the commercial industry for stripers isn't going to be revived to it's former glory. That's just fact. Only a tiny handful of commerical fishing companies (mainly muti-generation family businesses) continue the practice. And even then stripers only make up a portion of their yearly revenues.
I have no problem with the commerical rod&reel taging business, with some limits, as suppliment to farm fish. But the realities are that the striper fishery simply can not, and probably never will again, support both wide scale commercial bass fishing as well as recreational fishing. We can debate the reasons why the fishery won't support both and mourn the days gone by, but that is the fact.
Now, given the clearly limited resource of the striper, compare the numbers of people employed in the commercial bass industry vs. the recreational industry. I don't mean to reduce someone's livelihood to cold numbers, but the figures speak for themselves. Recreational anglers bring more positive economic value to a community/region/state (both private and public sectors) than the commercial industry.
We are reaching a point where hard choices have to be made. And as often happens with hard choices you can't please both sides. It is simply unwise and blind-sighted to overlook all the sales/revenues the recreational industry generates in favor of an ever shrinking industry.
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