The New Jersey Marine Fisheries Council meets this Thursday, September 4 at the Stafford Township Firehouse at 133 Stafford Avenue in Manahawkin starting at 5 p.m. A webinar option is also available for those who want to participate from at home, in the office or possibly the stadium seats. I hope to share the final agenda for this week’s meeting, as it becomes available, in our weekly video fishing forecast coming out on Thursday. Regrettably, I won’t be able to attend this meeting as I usually do, as it conflicts with the NFL opener with the Eagles and Cowboys at the Linc (my wife and I will be sitting in section 225; come say hello!)
Priorities.
I would venture to guess that the New Jersey Marine Fisheries Council priorities this week are based on August meetings of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC). The management bodies are deliberating over striped bass, bluefish, black sea bass, summer flounder and porgy, and I’d expect the New Jersey councilors to begin conversations about the state of the 2026 seasons on Thursday evening.
I should add that the basis for nearly all regulatory actions with regard to these fisheries – whether it comes down to ASMFC trying to figure out how to reduce striper mortality by 12% or MAFMC deciding upon whether or not to increase black sea bass limits by upwards of 30% – all comes down to recreational data collection. Whereas commercial fishermen weigh and sell their catch at the dock resulting in pound-for-pound “paper trail” analysis, angler effort and harvest is monitored by a random survey called the Marine Recreational Information Program, or MRIP.
I was reviewing bluefish slides from the summer management meetings and saw one bullet point on coastwide fisheries assessments noting how “MRIP is major data source and introduces a degree of uncertainty.” When coming up with a review of fish stocks, fisheries managers also rely on regional fishery independent surveys; here in New Jersey, in particular, it seems a major challenge in collecting data is angler compliance with the registration requirements. Those databases are theoretically used at the state and federal level to contact anglers in person about effort and catch. If we have garbage going into MRIP, then I guess we can expect garbage (“uncertainty”) coming out.
According to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), as of June 27th there were 83,586 individual registrations in the New Jersey Saltwater Recreational Registry Program for 2025, a 19% increase from the month of May. If we were to see that same percent increase on a month-to-month basis through August, it puts us at roughly 118,000 registered saltwater anglers in New Jersey as of today.
Longstanding government estimates from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries tab the number of saltwater anglers in New Jersey at anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 million. Clearly there’s a disconnect between facts and figures, which is why state fish and wildlife staffers have been meeting with law enforcement folks and other NJDEP staffers to discuss the lack of participation in the Saltwater Registry Program, and how to increase those numbers.
This year is really the first time that state enforcement folks have been able to take the gloves off and ask folks to provide their saltwater angler registry information, which many feel has been a long time coming. What happens when a scofflaw is given a citation for being unregistered, I really don’t know; but I still believe a dedicated Fish Court is one sensible solution to prosecuting fisheries violations in New Jersey.
The cost for registering to fish in saltwater here in New Jersey, to provide better fisheries data, is free. The cost of not being registered and getting caught, is not. So, what are you waiting for?
