No Way To Fish

A Montauk fisherman, 63-year-old Christopher Winkler, faces up to 20 years in prison if he is convicted in federal court in Islip for selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of fish that prosecutors say were taken illegally and sold illicitly from 2014 through 2017.

Tacking well clear of the details in that specific case, which are still being adjudicated, the aggressive prosecution nevertheless underscores the need for further discussion about bycatch, federal regulations and the very real frustrations that commercial fishermen have with a system that is, frankly, from certain angles, senseless and absurd.

To put it as simply as possible, managing fish stocks so they aren’t depleted by overfishing requires regulations. Those regulations require draggers to throw back fish that are caught up in nets despite being out of season or illegal to catch because of size and other regulations.

But the absurdity comes on the deck of the draggers. “Throwing back” a majority of the catch does little but feed the crabs and fish, since the trauma of being netted means most of the fish sent back overboard are either dead or dying. Those fish, the vast majority of them, are beyond helping fish stocks, which is the whole point of the regulations.

Meanwhile, fishermen are left perplexed by a system that requires them to discard a perfectly marketable catch — essentially tossing $100 bills over the side — for no particular gain. That can easily curdle into something more, including temptation.

It’s not how we should be fishing.

Winston Churchill once said that democracy “is the worst form of government — except for all the others that have been tried.” It’s a sad reality that the same could be said about managing ocean fishing with quotas.

It’s no simple feat to determine the actual size of a fish population from random samples, then determine how many can be killed without depleting the stock so much that it ceases to be commercially viable. Those calculations go all the way down to an individual boat’s limit, calculating the incidental bycatch that can be expected. Quotas are working on the assumption that if fishermen are only allowed to catch a small amount of a given species, they’ll target that species expeditiously and then move on to something else, minimizing the waste.

But the realities of commercial fishing are that nets catch all kinds of sea life, and if a quota limits a boat to a dozen fish a day, it inevitably will kill many times that number with each pull of the net. It only adds salt to the wound that so many of the fish going back overboard are valuable.

Without quotas, without regulations, it would be a free-for-all, and the aquatic environment would suffer. So regulators are left with a horrible reality of forcing massive waste in an effort to keep the overall mortality under the threshold of disaster.

And yet. The National Marine Fisheries Services has said that “bycatch is considered to be one of the greatest threats to the sustainability of the marine environment, and bycatch affects practically every species in the ocean.” So the damage is still being done, just in a different way, one that can be blamed on federal regulators — which makes for conditions where men and women who fish for a living can be forgiven for throwing up their hands at the unfairness.

Sorry, no solutions here. The honest truth is that it’s a Gordian knot that has bedeviled the industry for a very long time. Eliminate the use of nets? Be prepared to watch seafood prices soar, while less progressive nations swoop in without a thought to responsible management.

As with so many difficult problems, this one will take creativity, and the answer is most likely somewhere between the extremes. It does seem to stretch credulity to defend a system where so many fishermen are tossing perfectly marketable fish overboard, dead. The answer isn’t to eliminate the rules, but maybe there’s a compromise that begins to recognize the realities and address what seems to be an empty gesture toward conservation.

As a local man stares down the barrel of a prison term, or massive fines, maybe it’s time for a serious conversation about the circumstances surrounding the allegations and begin to recognize that sometimes law-breakers are created out of grinding frustration rather than mere criminal tendencies.