On February 27th, a meeting occurred at the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) headquarters in Kings Park to gather public comment about the three proposed black sea bass options for the 2023 season. For-hire captains throughout Long island predominantly attended the meeting. The meeting was open to the public in the form of in-person and webinar.
The species is jointly managed by two groups: the Atlantic States Fisheries Management Council and NOAA’s Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council. Even though the state managers and ASMFC staff get to take part in the review of all the information presented, the final decision is made at the federal level.
Despite having strong year classes, the recreational harvest limits on the past year’s returns call for a 10% reduction to the quota. The reason for this? The new updates to the collection date for these numbers have not integrated fully with the new management that’s in place. Unfortunately, this has led to the situation that we’re presented with right now. Despite the fact that many attempts have been made to fix this, the process is slow, and not much progress has been made. Some shifts were made were made in the percent change approach by managers to avoid total catastrophe to the season in 2023. Without this shift, there was a possibility that we could have seen a 30 to 40% percent reduction. Either way, 10% two years in a row now is a problem.
The three proposed options came in the form of season, bag limit, and size limit. Basically, they are the following: option one, which is an increase from 16 inches last year to 16-1/2 this year; option two would call for a season start date of July 1st, resulting in a loss of one week in comparison to last year’s regulations; option three that called for a bag limit of two fish for the first half of the season and that first half would also start on June 28th, resulting in the loss of a fish and five days of the season.
The plain truth is none of these options are good. We’re losing either way. It really comes down to which one will have the least amount of blowback to the industry itself. After some surveys were sent out to the public from the DEC about their thoughts on this, option one ended up being slightly preferred over option two for the 922 people that responded. Fifty-nine percent of those who answered were private boat fishermen, 37% fished off party and charter boats, and 4% considered themselves shorebound anglers.
Another meeting took place at the DEC headquarters on March 7th open to the public and those who sit on the Marine Resource Advisory Council (MRAC) to further discuss the options. In the end, it was option one that was decided upon to be the new suggested regulation for the feds.
Once the suggestion becomes accepted, it will take some time before the state adopts the regulation. However, before the sea bass season is underway, there will be new regulations in New York marine waters.
