To date, salt water fishery management is largely about dead fish. We worry about fishing mortality. We try to figure out how many fish can be landed without doing long-term harm to the stock. What we don’t think about very often is how many fish we should leave alive in the water to make the […]
Final action on the Unmanaged Forage Amendment on Monday! This is your last chance to weigh in Just about everyone who’s been out to the 30-fathom line this year has seen it. A ton of really small mackerel/tuna-like fish schooling in dense concentrations and great numbers. A couple of weeks ago, we started to see […]
Our coastal estuaries are about to get inundated as our most prolific salmon, fall Chinook, begin their journey home to finish out their lifecycle. With that inundation comes a plethora of invasives, including, if not especially, humans. Even though sport-angling boats will soon number in the thousands at the Buoy 10 fishery, our sport take […]
This spring NOAA Fisheries released two reports that signal encouraging progress for fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. The 2015 Status of the Stocks and Fisheries Economics in the U. S.: 2014 both documented the continuing success of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Until fairly recently, however, many Gulf fisheries were overfished or subject to overfishing and […]
Bass with bunker. Photo by Capt. John McMurray. Are managers seriously thinking about increasing the menhaden quota again? I’m not gonna waste any space here this time talking about all the benefits of recent menhaden concentrations. Not just because I’ve already done that here, but really, anyone who fishes at all gets it. Massive schools […]
We live in an amazing world. After a two-year tuna hiatus, I finally got to go out in pursuit of albacore off of the Oregon coast. Albacore, despite its incredible fighting power and deliciousness, is still supposed to be a second-class fish amongst avid salmon and steelhead (cold water) anglers. But anyone who actually has […]
Louisiana Congressman Garret Graves is the primary sponsor of H.R. 3094, legislation that would strip the National Marine Fisheries Service of its authority to manage red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, and to turn that authority over to the five Gulf states. Rep. Graves has provided a number of justifications in support of such […]
Using Common Sense about Unmanaged Forage Fish About every 6 to 8 months, my job experiences a bit of an implosion. I think that’s what keeps things exciting and certainly causes me to open my mind a bit more to other people’s perspectives. It’s not that I welcome such chaos, I’m told it just comes […]
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