Fishing Page

By SUSAN WEST

If fishermen and fisheries managers agree on anything, it’s that management of the commercial striped bass fishery should be improved, but consensus over how to do that remains elusive.

“We can continue with the status quo or find a better way to manage the fishery,” said Scott Crosson, socioeconomic program manager at the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, on Tuesday evening, Dec. 9, at a meeting of the Dare County Commission for Working Watermen.

Crosson said current management has lead to derby-style fishing where fishermen risk working in all sorts of weather, to fishing seasons that sometimes run as little as two or three days, to low prices paid to fishermen, and to harvests that sometimes run higher than the allowed limit for beach seines or gill-nets.

“Any time one gear sector goes over their limit, that overage has to come off someone else’s hide and that pits the community against each other,” he said.

State fisheries officials believe that a better way to manage the fishery could be limiting the number of fishermen in the fishery through what is called a limited access privilege program where shares of the total 480,480 pound harvest quota would be allocated to individual fishermen. Each fisherman who qualified to remain in the fishery would then be held accountable for not exceeding his individual harvest limit.

However, the state Marine Fisheries Commission would need approval from the legislature to adopt a limited access privilege program.

“The MFC needs that authority first, and then how to structure the program could be figured out,” Crosson said.

Those details would include eligibility requirements for participation in the fishery and a formula for allocating quota shares to individual fishermen. The initial allocation of shares is usually based on the number of pounds of a species landed by a fisherman in specific years identified in the management plan.

Commercial fisherman Kelly Schoolcraft of Frisco, who serves on the county Commission for Working Watermen, said limiting access would improve management. He said the fishery currently has around 700 participants, leaving the fishery vulnerable to harvest overages that could close down the fishery completely for as long as two or three years.

“I’d rather see something for the few than nothing for the many,” Schoolcraft said.

He recommended that eligibility for continued participation in the fishery be based not only on striped bass landings but also on landing a minimum amount of other types of fish or shellfish.

“That would put the fishery into the hands of people who are the harvesters,” Schoolcraft said.

But other members of the county working watermen’s commission expressed strong reservations about limited access programs.

“Boys that have beach fished most of their lives might not have landed the right number of pounds of rock in the right years to qualify. I’m against limited entry,” said Phil Ray Haywood of Colington.

Dan Whittle, senior attorney with Environmental Defense Fund in Raleigh, said there is “no magic formula” in developing a limited access program, and that a program could be developed to address those types of concerns.

“The most successful programs have been designed by fishermen. Fishermen have to come forward, designed the system, and then ask the MFC (Marine Fisheries Commission) to adopt it,” Whittle said.

The county working watermen commission took no formal action on supporting the MFC in its request for authority to implement a limited access privilege program in the ocean striped bass fishery.

“I don’t know how we could get behind something like this tonight when we don’t know the details and would have to trust the government to get it right,” said Mike Johnson, Dare County commissioner and chairman of the watermen’s committee.

“It’d be like buying a car without ever seeing it first,” said one fisherman.