Reaux

He could have eaten it, he could have had it mounted, he even could have released it . . . but to dump it!! Senseless.

Reaux

From the Washington Post

By Angus Phillips
Sunday, February 3, 2008; Page D03

With Plenty of Fish in the Chesapeake, a Great Catch Gets Dumped


When Fred Barnes of Chesapeake, Va., landed a 73-pound striped bass off Virginia Beach a week and a half ago for a pending state record, the excitement was just beginning. By week's end, the fish had been iced, diced, baked to inedible in a taxidermist's oven and viewed by 200,000 people, by one admirer's estimate.

When the hoopla was over, the great fish, which likely carried millions of eggs in its distended belly while it waited to head up the Chesapeake to spawn in spring, was bound for a landfill instead of the spawning grounds.

Forgive me if I don't join the bandwagon applauding the dispatch of another huge, record fish. When I first saw the picture, I felt the same awe as everyone else. The 52-incher was only 5 1/2 pounds shy of the world record set in 1982 in New Jersey. Fish like that don't come along every day.

So why kill it and dump it in the trash?

Fishing around the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and in the ocean nearby has been phenomenal over the last few years. A rebounding coastal striper population fuels the boom. Big stripers converge near the mouth of the bay in winter, massing for their spawning runs up Chesapeake tributaries in early spring.

From November through February, thousands of sportfishermen run out of Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Cape Charles and other ports to partake. They jig lures or drift eels around the Bridge-Tunnel until Dec. 31, when the inshore fishing season closes, then they move out to the ocean up to three miles offshore to troll lures in January and February, when the coastal season remains open.

It's been a good year. "We've had a dozen fish over 60 pounds checked in over the last two months," said Lewis Gillingham, who runs Virginia's saltwater fishing tournament. "Sixty pounds is almost the new 50-pound standard for stripers."

And bag limits are generous. Following guidelines from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, Virginia's Marine Resources Commission allows anglers to take two stripers a day for all but a three-week period around Christmas, when the limit drops to one a day.

Even Gillingham concedes the rules lead to behavioral excesses. Charter boats are tapping into the abundance, and he said parties of six anglers that hire a skipper can come back to the dock loaded with 16 big stripers of 20 pounds or more each -- two for each angler plus two apiece for the captain and mate. That's a lot of fish, almost all spawning females, which generally are bigger than the males. "In my personal opinion, do they really need it?" Gillingham asked.

Barnes's record fish hit a red and white Stretch 30 lure near the 4A sea buoy off Rudee Inlet. Pat Foster, skippering the Country Girl, a 36-footer on which Barnes was a passenger, said he was actually trolling faster than normal, hurrying to get to a flock of birds diving on bait nearby, when the strike came.

"I had no idea it was that big," Foster said. "I didn't even slow down at first. Finally, we saw the fish and I said, 'Whoa!' " Barnes told folks at the dock that the record striper put up a very modest fight and was in the boat in minutes.

Since then, it's been a whirlwind for fish and angler. The trophy was weighed and measured at Virginia Beach Fishing Center, then iced and trucked off to be shown at two boat shows over the weekend, one in Virginia Beach, another in Richmond. Then it went to the taxidermist and was baked in an oven to make a cast for trophies. The procedure rendered it inedible.

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Bob Beal, director of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission's Interstate Fisheries Program, said the 73-pounder was almost certainly a female packed with roe. "Almost all rockfish over 20 pounds are females," he said, and it almost certainly was fertile. "We do know that the larger females produce more eggs -- and more viable eggs" than younger, smaller fish, he said.

Beal's agency reckons stripers (or rockfish, as they're called in the Chesapeake) are doing well enough to withstand the fishing pressure they face. After nearly disappearing in the 1980s, when the coastal population fell to the all-time low of about 7 million, rockfish hit a record peak of about 65 million along the coast early this decade, Beal said. ASMFC estimates some 55 million pounds of spawning-age fish roam the coast today, down a bit from the all-time high in 2003.

But numbers can be deceiving. Nobody thought rockfish would get as scarce as they did in the 1980s, when Maryland voluntarily shut down the fishery for five years to save the state fish from extinction.

And some numbers are sketchy. ASMFC gets its statistics on recreational fishing pressure from the National Marine Fisheries Service, which conducts annual surveys to estimate who's catching what, where. One interesting fact about their findings is that NMFS has never surveyed fishing around the Bridge-Tunnel in winter. The booming fishery there just cropped up in the last decade and sometimes the government takes a while to catch up.

For the last several years, rockfishermen in Maryland and elsewhere along the coast have raised questions about Virginia's winter slaughter on the water. Is it really smart to be targeting big, fertile fish on their way to the spawning grounds?

Grist, from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, says his agency has redirected commercial fishing pressure away from bigger rockfish toward 10- to 12-pounders in an effort to preserve large spawners. Meantime, the coastal recreational fishery "has been growing like mad the last six years," he said, the principal drawing card being big fish, the bigger the better.

Grist said some recreational angling groups have voluntarily suggested cutting the daily limit for trophy fish to one a day in winter. But charter operators, motel and tackle shop owners, restaurateurs and others that profit from the rockfish boom evidently aren't buying in.

Here's what I think: If it's trophies people want, they ought to be happy with one a day, even one a season. Isn't that what "trophy" means? Here's something else I think: A 73-pound, roe-laden striped bass, intact, head-down in a dumpster, is wanton waste.
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Reaux