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NARR: It's 7 a.m. at Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay. Seagulls and ducks skim the water for their breakfast. (10 secs)
AMB: Seagulls, ducks, traffic. (5 secs)
NARR: At Pier 5, about thirty men and women hop from the worn wooden pier to the Sea Queen VII, an 85-foot party boat. Sea Queen's owners make their living by charging hook and line anglers for a half or full day of fishing. Stan Levine from Queens has been fishing recreationally for forty years. (14 sec)
AX: A bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work. (3 sec)
NARR: Levine has a fishing rod in one hand and a bucket ready to be filled in the other.
AX: It does make the day even if you have to throw it out it's still a great feeling. It's nice. Even if you don't catch a fish, being out on a day like today is great.
AMB: The motor revs up and water rushing.
NARR: The boat cruises out to Jamaica Bay.
AMB: Dip water under track.
NARR: After fifteen minutes, the boat reduces speed, anglers pierce their hooks with mussels
AMB: Insert 2 secs of Casting AMB.
NARR: and live worms (PAUSE) and cast their line out to sea.
AMB: CASTING.
NARR: Someone catches a fish…
AX: Fish in the boat…oh that one looks a little shy ah that may be a keeper, No…(dip under track still hear it in the background) (10 sec)
NARR: The shipmate aligns his measuring tape along the fish to see whether the catch meets the minimum length requirement for summer flounder.
AX: No,..maybe …just missed, oh, oh you just have to back up, no good, no good.
NARR: This fish is inches short.
AX: No good buddy. Small. Muah…throws. Splash. (26 secs)
NARR: You heard right. Kyle just kissed the slimy, brown and white fish before throwing it back in the water.
The small fish was too small and too young to be kept. The state law announced last week requires that all summer flounder caught recreationally must measure 19 and a half inches or more, that's one and a half inches longer than last year.
The new regulation means that most of the fish caught are thrown back in the water.
Sometimes there's the exception…This three-pounder
AMB: Insert AMB dipped under track. (He caught it he caught it he caught it. Crowd says: "Whoa" Yah)
NARR:…clearly exceeds the length requirement.
AX: Lift him in, nice and slow..up and up…OH…I'm lucky today. Yeah…Yeah. This is his your bucket? (fish dropped in bucket, water splashes everywhere)..
In theory the law makes sense. Dan Furlong works with the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Council in Delaware, one of the federal management organizations that determines the annual quotas on recreational and commercial fisheries. He says that regulations are intended to achieve a sustainable population.
AX: …So you want to build the stock up like a savings account to the biggest amount that you can that can be sustained by the ocean. What you want to do is set a fishing rate such that it is like an annuity, such that you can withdraw from that account a certain number of fish such that you leave enough in the population to reproduce at the same rate of removal. (26 secs)
NARR: So…"Sustainability" means that the fluke stock would reach a certain level at which their survival would no longer be threatened by fishing.
NEW SCENE
AMB: Motor fade. Sheepshead Bay ambience (seagull)
NARR: Back at the Sheepshead Bay harbor, Kevin Bradshaw stands on Pier 6. For 80 years, his family charter boat was moored here. Now it's gone, he sold it in January. He blames the regulations for a decline in business.
AX: And that's one of the reasons I sold my boat … and I'm sad about the whole thing, but I knew that the regulations wipe me out. (11 secs)
AX: My nephew caught a porgie that was seven inches long, small porgie, he was so excited, there was no regulation… but now the first fish that a kid fishes is a giant fish 17 inch, and he has to throw it back, it's heartbreaking and that turns people off of fishing. (40 secs)
NARR: Bradshaw's grandparents started leading chartered fishing trips in the 1920s. Back then, Bradshaw says, the water was teeming with fluke. In the 1980s the fish became harder to catch. Once the quotas were imposed there was slow growth in the population. Now, Bradshaw says, the fish are again abundant but the quotas discourage his recreational fishermen and women.
AX: a 19.5 inch fish in this area will literally put the fluke boats out of business. Nobody will go fishing because you will not be able to keep any fish. (10 sec)
NARR: The regulations aren't meant to wipe the fisheries out; they're meant to allow the fishing industry to thrive in future years. The North Atlantic Cod fish is an example of a poorly managed species. Cod was overfished in the 1970s and 1980s and today only six percent of the original spawning stock remain. The cod may never fully recover. In order to avoid such a fate, the Atlantic fishery managers have set a goal for fluke: a fully sustainable population by 2013. Matt Rand heads an environmental lobby group in Washington. He says that time is running out for the fish.
AX: Fish are the last wild food we have out there. We theoretically could lose them. (13 sec)
NARR: He says the length limits will lead to future economic benefits.
AX: When fisheries are at healthier levels therefore better return on your investment if you are fishermen, more fish out there (remove if possible) you can actually catch more fish. (15 secs)
NARR: But for now, people who rely on fishing for a living say they are hurting. They don't oppose regulations entirely, . But they say the new regulations are based bad science making the target level unreasonable.
Fishing management official Dan Furlong recognizes the strict the length requirement is a problem.
AX: (cut out…"and the other thng is") By increasing the minimum size you are targeting the oldest fish in the fishery and as that relates to the females, they're the most fecunt ones, the bigger the fish, the older the fish the more eggs she'll put out. So you are selecting the high end producers as your target. (23 sec)
NARR: Finally, there's the unintended consequence of the thrown back fish. Today's length requirement of 19 and a half inches, that's about the size of your arm from elbow to finger tips, means that as many as 80% of the fish caught on charter boats will be thrown back into the water. And those throw-backs don't always live.
Remember that fish that received a goodbye kiss?
AX: Muah….splash…
NARR: Well, there's a 10 to 15 percent chance that it didn't survive. So, the length requirement intended to protect the fish is actually killing many of them.
Furlong says ongoing discussion between environmentalists, recreational and commercial fishermen that quotas may have unintended consequences that actually harm the fluke population, and hurt the fishermen's industry.
AX: I think that may be problematic with management. We need to look at these things in terms of their socio economic impact in addition to the biology itself. (12 sec)
NARR: Furlong says that continued discussion along with improved data collection, will eventually lead to the quotes being seen as NOT as a restriction, but as a means to better the industry.
NEW SCENE
AMB: Dock loading ambience.
NARR: Commercial fishermen unload boxes of fluke in Gosman's Dock in Montauk, Long Island. The fish are packed with ice and shipped out to Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx. Commercial fisherman Malcolm McClintock says he suffers from the regulations just as much as the recreational angler.
AX: Are we striving to have more fish, or are we just striving to put people out of business, you know, what is it? (8 secs)
NARR: McClintock says that if he had the chance to start over, he wouldn't be a fisherman because it's too hard to make a living. But now, he sticks with it because it's all he knows. (15 secs)
AX: It's a little late now to get into computer programming I think. Ha ha ha. (6 secs)
NARR: A few minutes later McClintock and two other crew men cruise out of the bay and into the Atlantic Ocean.
AMB: Ocean
NARR: From the South fork of Long Island, you can see 10 boats fishing in the Atlantic Ocean.
AMB: Coast, waves dip under track. (Amb Ocean tide)
NARR: A charter boat anchors beside a drifting commercial boat. The tide swells and changes color from blue to grey. Saltwater air tingles your lungs. The sea is Richard Jones' office.
AMB: Ocean fade to restaurant ambience.
NARR: Some of the fluke caught in the Atlantic end up in Richard Jones' Montauk restaurant. Jones, a 30 year veteran of commercial fishing, looks out on the harbor from the restaurant, which he co-founded with other fishermen. He says fishing is a job like no other. (9 secs)
AX: It's a definite freedom, where you are dealing with the elements, sometimes it's hard, sometimes you know, it's beautiful, you know, it's a different way of life one you can get used to. And it can be very enjoyable… (total 28 secs)
NARR: What's a good day of fishing for you? (incl in total)
AX: when you make a day's pay, nobody gets hurt and the boat doesn't break, that's a good day… laughing… (incl)
NARR: In Jones' restaurant servers wear t-shirts that read: "Respect the ocean, Harvest the Bounty, Feed the People." This is not a bad mission statement for all those who like to fluke.
Now if only they could find consensus on what "respect the ocean" really means.
Tania Haas, Columbia Radio Ne