The Bounty of the Sea: A Public Good or an Industry Privilege?

With faces weathered by sun and sea and eyes crinkled from years battling salt water, the individuals sitting in the council room wear their lifetimes on their flannel sleeves. Idle hands, etched with scars and calluses, tell the story of rods cast and nets hauled in the pursuit of a daily catch. A figure stands, catching the attention of those in the room.

When he’s not surveying the Long Island Sound from the captain’s chair of his 42-foot charter boat, Captain James Joseph Schneider can be found here, in the meeting hall of the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA). The RFA is a nonprofit organization that represents the livelihoods of for-hire anglers.

For those involved in fishing culture along the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, the charter fishing industry is a crucial piece of the northeastern maritime economy. 

Back at the RFA meeting, Schneider begins his plea. His voice cuts through the small talk that fills the room, commanding the council’s attention.

With fifty years of experience on the water, the Long Island native is no stranger to the ebbs and flows of the northeastern seaboard. A seasoned for-hire recreational captain with ties to

the fishery management sector, Schneider, who owns the aptly named James Joseph Schneider Fishing Company, understands the shifting currents of the fishing industry. But when it comes to navigating regulatory standards, even a fisherman as knowledgeable as Schneider faces challenges. It is these challenges that he frequently addresses during RFA discussions.

Schneider and other charter fishermen worry regulatory departments like the New York State Department of Conservation (NYSDEC) overlook charter livelihoods when setting regional fishing standards. During a discussion with The Politic this February, the veteran captain expressed concerns. 

“As of right now, as we approach my season starting in April, I have no idea what the regulations are for this coming season,” he continued, “I can’t advertise. I can book trips for the few species that have predetermined regulations, but I still have no quota and size limit to set my trips up for the next few months.”

Fishing regulations are important to protect the environment and prevent overfishing. But captains, anglers, and boaters in the recreational fishing industry collide with regulations they see as unnecessary and pernicious to their businesses. 

Schneider feels that companies and individuals suffer when regulations disrupt recreation. The general charter customer population, which includes occasional anglers and families aiming to preserve the American fishing tradition, can find themselves disadvantaged.

“The person that saves money to buy their fishing rod, that can only go fishing once a year and take their kids fishing on a charter boat or maybe go fish off the beach, they want to be able to keep one fish. They’re not asking to wipe out the species, but part of the experience is taking the fish home, having dinner with their family, talking about it, and getting completely involved,” Schneider said.

Captains in the Northeast generally share this opinion. Peter Cavallo, part-time captain for Sound Bound Charters, a company based out of New Rochelle, New York, agrees that some of the regulations on recreational fishermen are constraining. For example, size slots, which protect fish populations by requiring anglers to throw back small fish, disturb customer satisfaction.

“Catch-and-release is a great thing for conservation, but people are also looking for a meal at the end of the day. They’re paying a high price to come out fishing, and to only be allowed to keep one fish in a three-inch slot is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous,” said Cavallo.

Furthermore, differences in licensing and permitting systems between states, specifically between Northeastern states that share the same waters and weather patterns, also represent a major gripe of charter fishers. Charter captains encounter incompatible requirements for obtaining permits, reporting catches, and adhering to safety standards depending on which side of the state line they operate. 

Since 2005, Matt Casamassima has been the owner of Cos Cob Charters, a for-hire fishing company moored in Greenwich, Connecticut. He explained why an intertwined net of environmental standards set by different states present a challenge for fishermen. 

“My boat is in Greenwich, but if I go west one mile, I’m in New York, and if I go straight, I’m in Connecticut. If you’re fishing the [Long Island] Sound, sometimes you’re fishing New York waters, and if you go far enough east, sometimes you’re fishing Rhode Island waters,” Casamassima said. Each state has competing expectations and rules, which makes it difficult for fishermen to comply with all of them. 

The subsistence of captains like Schneider and Cavallo rely on customer satisfaction. The continued success of a daily catch permits a greater certainty of customer retention, ensuring pay for captains, mates and other members of their respective crews, as well as fuel, bait and mooring costs. With this constant pressure, many captains find the regulations suffocating. But these regulations exist for a reason, and those mired in the recreational fishing industry sometimes overlook the complexities intrinsic to creating them. 

Environmental policy-makers balance both the socioeconomic and ecological ramifications of the guidelines they create. The joint imperative to protect and sustainably manage ocean resources for future generations, whilst also supporting the professions that depend heavily on the consumption of such resources, demands sound decision-making.

NYSDEC official Maureen Davidson discussed the internal processes that she and her colleagues oversee in simultaneously managing environmental values and supporting marine businesses. In an email to The Politic, she explained the intricacies that are involved in establishing conservation legislation. 

“One of the major challenges is the requirement for DEC to manage and balance the needs of commercial fishermen, recreational anglers, and other users of our local marine waters. However, there are other interests, such as offshore wind projects, aquaculture, shoreside development, drilling and dredging projects, energy storage depots, and submarine cabling that compete too. DEC must weigh the value and needs of all parties competing for ocean resources.”

Satisfying the diverse interests of all stakeholders is not the only challenge regulators face. Mark Grant, a fishery policy analyst with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Services, added that setting national standards for federal waters, particularly when states act and impose conservation amendments independently, represents another difficulty.

“Because the states are independent and have their own processes for rulemaking, there can be a delay between when the government does something and state matches it. Or, a state might not choose to perfectly match what the federal government is doing,” Grant explained.

As a board member of the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC), one of eight national councils that enforce regulations for fisheries, Grant directly engages with recreational fishermen. The analyst must also incorporate the perspective of another important stakeholder: the commercial fishing industry. 

For generations, commercial fishing fleets have been the backbone of northeastern maritime economies. These fleets are often characterized by large-scale netting operations and are responsible for the continuous supply of seafood to national markets. 

Charter fishing captains like Schneider generally acknowledge that fishing regulations are necessary for conservation. But, they often complain that the burden of regulation falls heaviest on recreational anglers over commercial fisheries, who are running larger-scale — and therefore potentially more environmentally harmful — operations. Because commercial fleets are responsible for hauling copious quantities of fish to shore in order to meet the needs of nationwide seafood aisles, quotas for the industry differ tremendously from the for-hire boats’ daily trip limits.

“There are two commercial boats in Montauk that own all of the quotas in the region, and it’s just not fair,” said Schneider.

It’s not just quota differences that rankle charter fishermen. Because of the varying methods they use to catch fish, commercial boats are also subject to disparate rules for another important regulation: catch size. 

“If you’re a commercial fisherman, you can keep a 14-inch summer flounder, which is pretty small. For recreational fishing, it looks like we might be up to a 19-inch fish this year. That’s a big difference,” said Lake, “Recreational anglers don’t think it’s fair that the commercial guys can keep the smaller fish.”

But from Lake’s position as a policymaker, he explained that there are reasons behind the dissimilar expectations for commercial versus recreational anglers. For one thing, the different fishing methods used by the two groups would make applying the same standards to both a challenge. 

“While commercial does sometimes use rod and reel, they also use a whole suite of other gears to get the fish, including otter trawls, which are nets they drag behind the boat. They set these nets stationary, and let the fish passively swim into them,” explained John Lake, supervising marine biologist of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM).

Because trawling by nature prohibits fishermen from measuring their collected fish at the time of harvest, size slots tend to be looser within the commercial sector. However, despite the common image of commercial vessels as dominant titans of the sea, the reality is scaled down.

Mark Grant, the NOAA fishery policy analyst, understands the concerns of recreational for-hire captains along the Northeast from Maine to Florida. However, he emphasized that many misconceptions exist in the public’s knowledge of commercial fishing vessels.

“I think we now have maybe 150 commercial vessels that land around fish for profit. So while people’s perception of commercial fishing is one of a really big operation, that’s not the case anymore,” Grant said. 

Beyond the quantity of vessels, Grant noted that commercial fishing quotas are highly regulated — more so than many recreational fishermen realize. In fact, the perceived magnitude of commercial harvests is largely inflated, as reaps have been meticulously monitored through increasingly stringent policies. 

Interestingly, commercial fishermen undergo more surveillance than their charter counterparts.“This year, [commercial vessels] are required to have monitoring on 90% of their trips, whether it’s a human or video cameras. Starting this May, we want it to go into 100%. We have very accurate data about what they catch, what they keep, what they discard, where and when,” Grant said.

In fact, marine policy officials largely agree that commercial boats face more regulations than charter vessels. Though charter vessels experience smaller bag limits, the oversight of these policies cannot be standardized to the same extent as the commercial industry.

Despite common conceptions, the commercial fishing industry has many surveillance tools in place to prevent overfishing and regulation noncompliance. The same cannot be said about recreation.

The recreational fishing sector is not just composed of charter boats. It also includes individuals on the shorelines or their own independent boats fishing for fun. This makes it almost impossible to establish an official regulatory system for the recreational sector as a whole. While certified charter captains answer to NOAA and U.S. Coast Guard Inspection Services, shoreline fishermen and other individuals fishing for themselves are primarily subject to park management guidelines and a loose honor system. Thus, commercial crews tend to be responsible for complying with regulations to a greater degree than recreational fishermen.

Grant confirmed that in Maine, where cod and haddock are the main catch, the bulk of the harvest is actually caught by the recreational sector, including both for-hire captains and independent fishermen: “In the case of cod, for example, more than half of the total catch is recreational fishermen and not commercial, which a lot of people are very surprised to hear.”

While the perception of unfairness around separate regulations for commercial boats may be misguided, individuals such as Dr. Justin Davis of the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (DEEP) understand the roaring tide of frustration from the recreational sector. Davis realizes that quelling the turmoil is no easy task.

“From the standpoint of fairness and equity amongst all people participating in the recreational sector, I can see the argument that there’s a fundamental unfairness there if you’re giving people the opportunity to pay money for a different access to the resource. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer there. That’s the challenge. The more you give the for-hire sector a different set of regulations, it can create a setup where other folks in the sector look at that as an unfair advantage,” Davis said.

Direct communication between officials and representatives across the fishing industries has become more necessary as the sector grows in size and complexity. Those invested in the marine arena, like James Schneider, have dedicated their lives to providing personal insight on the matters.

For 40 years Schneider has driven up and down the Northeast, attending council meetings and communicating his feelings about fishing regulations. He would like to see members of the recreational fishing community more welcomed to share their perspectives with policy-makers. 

Casamassima agreed, noting that many in the for-hire community wonder whether conservation officials have sought out a “voice for the for-hire fleet or commercial fishermen or guys that are on the water every day.”

Creating regulations that satisfy the wishes of the various stakeholders in the northeast fishing industry is a complex task. Still, commercial and charter fishermen feel that more could be done to provide community outreach in the creation of these regulations. 

Peter Lauda, a commercial fisherman and a colleague of Schneider, weighed in. He runs both Target Rock Lobster & Bottom Fishing Charters, a for-hire business docked in Long Island, and Lauda’s Lobsters, a commercial operation. With a finger on the pulse of both the commercial and for-hire world, he voiced the concerns of fishers across the industries.

“We fishermen should be the ones making laws to please ourselves, not politicians in a building that have never been fishing and don’t know the industry,” Lauda declared.

Conservation officials like Grant and Davis certainly do seek the insight of coastal natives with personal stakes in the fishing game. But a greater effort to incorporate these perspectives — an opportunity for both commercial and recreational fishermen to see themselves represented in industry laws — could make for calmer seas surrounding this stormy issue. As it stands, the need for well-informed policy may be an opportunity to both protect marine environments and incorporate the unique input of those that rely on them. It could provide a space for bureaucrats, fishermen, captains, and businesses to come together and work toward a legislative framework that reflects the patchwork of interests swirling in the seas off the northeastern coast.