Is There a Bass Hole…?

Just so you know, there are more fluke (aka summer flounder), more striped bass and more horseshoe crabs near our shores now than anyone alive has ever seen. But in New York the fluke season is closed for both sport and commercial fishermen, the horseshoe crab take is closely controlled and President Bush has moved towards making striped bass a game fish. All of this is largely because of the “green” movement’s new power and popularity, having little to do with reality or the rule of law.

In our representative government, the elected officials hold all resources in trust for the real title holders, i.e., all the people, especially those who want to make use of them. In the case of the fluke, while these large and succulent bottom hugging flatfish literally pave the sea floor off our beaches for much of the year, prices for local flounder fillet have soared to levels far beyond the reach of most wage earners. The Chinese fishermen are having banner years as US demand for their cheaper (but frozen) flounder fillet has skyrocketed, as it is one third the per pound retail price. And “Country of Origin Labeling” (COOL) laws have been rejected repeatedly by Congress so the consumers usually don’t know what they are buying. The horseshoe crabs are being protected through a stretch of environmental protection theory, as some biologists claim that the endangered non-indigenous-to-America sandpiper, the red knot, is in steep decline because they can’t get enough horseshoe crab eggs to eat. They only get the chance to eat these tiny green spheres for a couple of weeks a year, and as anyone who is privy to the shores when the mating rituals take place for these large brown horseshoe shaped crustaceans knows, there are literally millions and perhaps billions of them. There are only a few thousand of the pigeon sized red breasted shore birds left, and while we have to suffer under these draconian and far-fetched protective measures, the locals shoot them and eat them in their South American winter homes.

And now the striped bass. These fish are currently at population levels perhaps not seen since colonial days. And they eat everything. It seems useless to try and protect the populations of fish like fluke, flounder, blackfish and sea bass when these large and very intelligent predators gang up on them on every tide while they try to migrate in and out of our bay and harbor inlets and channels. But, alas, we are told that “natural predation” cannot be taken into account, so the bureaucrats cannot manage one species in order to effect the numbers of another. However, the first fisheries management law that many around here ever heard of was that any landed starfish cannot be thrown back alive as they eat a prodigious amount of shellfish. There is a similar law for conch (aka “scungili“) for the same reasons. Ironically, it is for conch fisherman that most of the horseshoe crabs are harvested, as they are the absolutely best bait to lure these delectable marine snails into specially designed traps.

And into this mess comes stumbling along our President, who out of the blue declares he wants to protect the striped bass by making them into a game fish, encouraging more people to indulge in this beloved pass time of his. It is well documented that under the current management scheme the recreational catch of striped bass coast wide far exceeds the commercial take. This already violates the spirit of the law in that the federal government has declared the fishery “fully recovered” and is pressuring the States to loosen up commercial restrictions. And it is already the case that, unless you live next door to a bass fanatic who catches far more than he and his family can eat, you have to pay close to twenty dollars a pound for the fillet. If President Bush has his way the former will be the only way you’ll get some, unless you have the time, the wherewithal and the expertise to go out and catch your own.