From: cherasia@viper.bear.com (Peter Cherasia)
Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.fishing
Subject: Re: New Jersey Tuna Fishing
Date: 29 Sep 92 16:52:42 GMT
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

Mark Levesque (levesque@wahoo.enet.dec.com) wrote:
: 
:  Peter Cherasia (cherasia@viper.bear.com) wrote:
: 
: 
:  Yes, it is a problem that the fish take a long time to mature. People catching
: and keeping juvenile fish exacerbates this problem by ensuring that a smaller
: population
: will get an opportunity to reach maturity in the first place.
: 
:  These aren't bluefish. It's not like the fish you kept had reached their
: potential.
: You stopped them before they even got started. I'd be ashamed to say that
: I kept a 15 pound bluefin, just as I'd be ashamed to say I kept an 8" striped
: bass.
: 
: >There are still relatively 
: >vast numbers of bluefins roaming the east coast and they are fairly well 
: >protected. 
: 
:  How do you figure? The catch per effort metrics have plummeted by two orders
: of magnitude in the past 30 years. This means it now takes roughly 100 times
: the effort to catch a fish now that it took 30 years ago. How does this
: translate
: into "vast numbers" and "well protected"?


 Mark, I agree with most of what you have to say but the fact that the catch
metric has dropped significantly in the last 30 years doesn't mean there isn't
a healthy population of school bluefins on the east coast. The FACT is that 
there are vast numbers of fish. I've seen them, caught them and talked to a lot
guys who share the same opinion. The statistic that you quote only means that 
relative to the population today there were a hell of alot more tuna. Should
we be striving to restore the population to the numbers they once were, absolutely but thats probably unrealistic without enforcing draconian regulations. You 
have to remember that 30 years ago horse mackerel (bluefins) were considered 
poor eating and generally a nuisance to commercial and recreational fishermen 
targeting other species. Now they are an important resource to all and need to
be managed as such.

As to well protected, although I'm not a marine biologist the 1 fish/man/day 
does seem to me to equate to well protected given the numbers of fish we see.
In my opinion the regulations regarding sportfishermen are protective compared
to a commercial purse seiner catching 10's or 100's of tons per day.

Am i ashamed that we kept 3 30# tuna out of a school that was comprised of 5000
or 10000 fish, quite honestly -- hell no. I think your comment was a bit 
ridiculous and the analogy to striped bass inappropriate. That particular day
I had seven guys on the boat and could have legally kept 7 fish. So in our own
way we were attempting to conserve the resource by only keeping what we wanted
to eat and no more. Would I comply with stricter regulations to ensure that my
kids and others had the same opportunity to hunt for these beautiful fish, YES.

The point I was trying to make in my previous post was that commercial pressure
was destroying the resource NOW by severely depeleting the spawning population 
and that the regulations for protecting the schoolies from a recreational 
perspective but not a commercial perspective were adequate. The hole in the 
current plan to protect the stocks is that if the breeders aren't protected now
and are wiped out we would be waiting 10-(?) years till the current school 
bluefin population matures enough to reproduce. Not a good plan!


			Pete Cherasia

		My opinions not my employers ... 
From: maf@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Mark Forsyth)
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 14:27:21 GMT
Subject: Re: Anglers Workshop
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA