The much-anticipated stock assessment.....

[fishonnelsons]

Just some points:

1. Agree with Jay, there are a ton of fish "out further", BUT, the surf casters have seen an overall decline in catching.

2. The decline in shore fish probably has to do more with other factors - where does the bait go (sand eels are not burying themselves close to shore at the end of the Cape anymore), changes in bottom configuration and current flow, dare I say "seals", and some even believe the outflow pipe has affected the water in our area (???).

3. The data - does show a decline, maybe not to pre-set "we must act" levels, but if it is declining and seems to be on a trend, why not act now? Make some changes to try and reverse the trend.

4. The HAMMER does not have to come down crazy - but as a pretty active charter captain, making the limit 1 per person is not that big a deal, and I'll leave the size determinations to the scientists. I have seen way too many fish taken - and we keep telling our customers "that will be a lot of fillets" and they keep saying "we'll eat it" and at the end of the trip they look at the pile of fillets and say "do you guys want any, there's too much for us".

Not an easy issue for sure, but my vote would be for some moderate changes in both the recreational side and "commercial" side.

[likwid]

Avg inshore temps were high this year.
Usually find Bass around sandspit any day/any time, but the water temps were waaay up.
Same running the beach of Nonquit. Dead quiet, hot water.

[bart]

I tend to side with a post DZ recently put up about wetsuiters. I think the same can be true about the boat guy. I think those fish offshore have always been there and are not a true representation of the overall health of the stocks. The inshore fishery has disappeared for whatever reason, how long before the boat guys start seeing a decrease?

And just another point to think about. Ken Abrahams( I think that's his name) has an interesting theory that the same "families" of fish return to the same areas every year. I would be interested to see if those fish that took a pounding off Chatham are there next year....

[likwid]

Originally Posted by bart

The inshore fishery has disappeared for whatever reason, how long before the boat guys start seeing a decrease?

If my fridge doesn't have anything I want to eat in it, I'm probably gonna go to the store....

[bart]

Yeah but buying new groceries doesn't cost 20 grand...

[Mike P]

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...