big fish

poconos trip a few years back. we found some bait by the dock and cut up the worms amongst us. this what we got.

—mkl

p.s. spring weather is bringing bait to the back bays. get your gear ready. i have half of it together so far…

as if this 70 degree weather wasn’t bad enough

check out this striper blitz video i found on the fishing site today. good lord!

anyone getting out there yet? i’m thinking this weekend might be a good time to scout things out. also, don’t forget for those looking for fishing karma for the upcoming year, there’s a Jamaica Bay cleanup happening toward the end of April. god knows i need some. i’ll send out more reminders as we get closer. for now, watch and drool.

—mkl

i can feel it in the air

I don’t know how The Surfcaster got my new address but when I got home from work today this was in the mail. I haven’t ordered anything from them in over a year and that was probably rod-building parts I needed, but my dad has a couple of their plug bags and they’re pretty good quality. Not like the high-end plug bags, but then again, you’re not paying $300 for one either. But it’s definitely better than the POS Aquaskinz bag I’m still using (full disclosure: this is one of the basic AS bags, the low-end ones that cost about $100, which isn’t really all that cheap). I was checking out my dad’s plug bag last time we went fishing back at the Indian River Inlet in Delaware back around Thanksgiving and it’s pretty decent. We didn’t catch any fish that day though, but there were some schoolies to be had and I saw some guys carrying some nice looking blackfish as we were on our way out to the end of the jetty.

Anyhow this catalog is full of eye candy to get your blood going for warmer weather; luckily for me I’m feeling pretty broke at the moment so I won’t be adding anything to the plug collection right now. But with the way this winter has been, we might be seeing fish moving in sooner than usual. March may still be full of snowy surprises however, as the temperature is hopping around like a jumping bean. 68 degrees this Thursday or so they say and right now I feel like I need to grab another blanket from out of the closet. I’m itching to get out there and get a line in the water, eager to try to flip my 2011 luck around. I suppose I should finally get around to fixing the straps on my Korkers and replacing some of the studs (i.e. stop procrastinating and stepping over them every time I walk through the door).

We here at BKUAA HQ are planning to do another party boat trip in May, I’m thinking the second weekend. There’s also a Jamaica Bay cleanup some guys over at Stripersonline are planning that we can join up with—if you fished JB last spring like Dave Cole and I did, then you probably know what a shit show it becomes with all the garbage. Not a bad way to get some karma with the fish gods, eh? This is going to happen April 29. Contact us on the Facebook page or in the comments if you’re down to earn some.

What are you doing to prepare for the season? What are your fishing goals this year? I simply want to fish more this season. Between work, training, writing, drinking, and other grown-up crap I just have to make the time. Breezy ain’t that far away. I’d like to get more time with fishing friends. I also hope to make it back out to Montauk again a couple times this summer, maybe Jason at The Fin will let me tag along one more time, but I have to start learning spots myself too. Hopefully I can spend some more time out there scouting around during the day instead of only squinting during the new moon or falling into the ocean.

—mkl

cool stop-motion video on sustainable fishing (by a sushi restaurant)

This is a pretty cool video forwarded to me by BKUAA MC Dave Cole (does anyone have a video of him singing that song at the derby close? the one about him being the greatest fisherman ever?). The video was created and filmed by Vincent Peone, partially to detail harmful commercial fishing techniques and suggesting sustainable alternatives via stop-motion camerawork, before the kicker toward the end is revealed that the video was produced for a sushi restaurant in Portland, Oregon called Bamboo Sushi. Now, this isn’t necessarily some crass company’s way to buy themselves into the Green Revolution. Bamboo Sushi was voted the most sustainable seafood restaurant in America by the online journal Fish2Fork; coincidentally, or perhaps not at all surprising, the worst offenders rated by Fish2Fork were also sushi restaurants, notably Bar Masa here in NYC and Sushi Roku in Vegas. Bamboo Sushi is also partnered with, or certified by, the Marine Stewardship Council, the Green Restaurant Association, The Monterey Aquarium, The Blue Ocean Institute, Kidsafe Seafood, and other organizations.

While I think the above video is amazing in its own visual way, I do think the suggested solutions are highly oversimplified and geared toward engaging visceral reactions rather than realistically approaching the problems of overfishing, bycatch, and the increasing commodification of fish. Then again, they only had four minutes or so of video to work with, so perhaps it wasn’t budgeted to get too in-depth into real (and realistic) solutions and alternatives. By the way, a couple weeks ago I finished reading Four Fish by Paul Greenberg and I highly recommend it if you’re a person who loves fishing and loves to eat fish. The book isn’t going to change the world, but it’s worth your time to learn what positive alternatives are being attempted in terms of reviving fisheries, fish farming, the loss and recovery of ocean ecosystems, and also the downsides to all of these things.

—mkl

guy catches a killer whale

Yo son, this shit is crazy. A guy in New Zealand hooked a killer whale while trolling for tuna. Then the internet war began among people who thought the fishermen should have stuck their boga grip in the killer whale’s maw and unhooked the poor beast, and then the other people who said “you’re a moron.” Either way, this story is pretty damn cool.

—mkl

fun times in the derby

does anyone have the stones to get back up here next fall?

Trawler Season Open! In Which NC Has Learned Nothing

remember this?

Yesterday, January 17, North Carolina opened its striped bass trawler season by decree of our old friend Dr. Louis B. Daniel III. If you remember last year’s travesty of miles-long trails of dead striped bass around Oregon Inlet and it pissed you off to see such wanton waste, take a moment to see what changes NC Fisheries management have made this year: instead of a 50-fish/day limit, it is now a 100-fish/day limit. So a netting process designed to ensnare thousands of fish at a time is now limited to a single century per day and all bycatch must be given the heave-ho overboard, which will surely eliminate the embarrassment the state suffered last year. We can be assured that the thousands of dead fish floating in state waters will be happily plucked from the sea by the same flocks of birds surf fishermen once saw as an auspicious sign of live fish. Since there is no daily weight limit, the trawlers will continue to legally cull their catch to maximize profits and do their legal duty of tossing undersized dead fish overboard while destroying the ocean floor.

An article from last year’s fish kill described it like this: “The kill was so large that no one, including the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, has ventured a guess as to its size.” Since the NC Division of Marine Fisheries doesn’t seem to recall the black eye it got last year, it’s time for us to remind them again. If you read the posts we had on the site last year (this one and this one), then it should be a no brainer to see that this is no way to run a fishery. It’s irresponsible at best, and a flagrant middle finger to those of us who actually give a shit about the state of the marine fishery in the Atlantic. For those of us who had a bad season, and there were a lot of us, don’t think that incidents like these in NC aren’t a factor. Forget for a moment the division between commercials and recs, the trawlers are allowed to do this by law. The trawlers are legally bound to dump overage and undersized fish over the side. In this instance, the law is the problem.

If you remember last year, then you hopefully also recall that the furious backlash the DMF received, primarily in the form of letters, emails, and phone calls from people like you and I, actually made them take notice and change their policy. (You may also remember the grassroots effort a few months ago to pass new legislation regarding menhaden, a movement spearheaded by the Pew Environmental Group, which resulted in a victory for the fish.) Unfortunately, money talks, as they say, and the millions of dollars pouring into the coffers of state representatives, and other appointees who make these decisions, makes for short memories and it’s up to fishermen and women to remind them. I’m going to contact Jamie Pollack (recall the FSIA and possible changes in the Magnuson-Stevens Act in this post) at Pew tonight to see what she can offer as far as info and work out a form letter you can email to the people who are supposed to be responsible for the state fishery. I know that a lot of you think it’s bullshit to send these, but it really only takes a few minutes of your time, and, as the two earlier examples showed, it can make a difference.

For now, here are the names and contact info for members of the NC DMF.

Director’s Office
Louis Daniel – Director
Dee Lupton – Deputy Director
Catherine Blum – Contact
Morehead City Office – (252) 808-8013 or 1-800-682-2632
Via E-mail: Catherine.Blum@ncdenr.gov

Fisheries Management
David Taylor
Morehead City Office – (252) 808-8074 or 1-800-682-2632
Via E-mail: David.L.Taylor@ncdenr.gov

Lead Bioligist: Striped Bass, Central/Southern
Katy West
Washington
(252) 946-6481
Katy.West@ncdenr.gov

—mkl

some reading material for y’all

New issue of Zeno Hromin’s Surfcaster’s Journal is up. Check it out here. Also, I picked up Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food from the bookstore yesterday. It’s a “food” book, akin to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemna, but specifically about the history and future of fish as food. There’s a great quote in the beginning of the book from some fish monger at the Fulton Fish Market in the 1940s. “Fish is the only grub left that the scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on and improve. The flounder you ea today hasn’t got any more damned vitamins in it than the flounder your great-great-granddaddy ate, and it tastes the same. Everything else has been improved and improved and improved to such an extent that it ain’t fit to eat.” I wrote briefly about Greenberg’s blog post for the New York Times in this post last month.

I’m entering into my winter phase when I start reading 4-5 books at the same time and finish three of them. I was talking to John Majer about John Skinner’s new bucktail book (“Fishing the Bucktail”) that I want to get. I think John M. already has it; maybe he can offer a review. I already have Doc Mueller’s book on bucktailing, but you can never read too much about the greatest lure ever invented. Speaking of which, Skinner has some really cool fishing videos up on YouTube, a couple of which I’m posting below. What else are you guys doing and reading this winter? I’m starting to put together some dates for our next fishing boat trip… I’m thinking middle of May might be a good time to head back to Sheepshead Bay and the Marilyn Jane V. We’ll see…

fishing the LA River

I was messing around in YouTube just now looking up weird fishing videos and found the one above. In a special case of synchronicity, as soon as I started watching the video, this song “Expectations” by Belle and Sebastian started playing in the background, and I thought, “OK, what kind of hipster films some old crackhead fishing the LA River with Belle and Sebastian as the soundtrack?” This feeling was reinforced as the fish unhooked itself and started to flop back in the water and the old guy yells at the camera man to grab the fish, to which the cameraman responds, “I’m not going to grab that thing, what do I look like?” And I was so ready to filet the guy and say, “You look like a total fucking nancy who’s too scared to pick up a fish and uses Belle and Sebastian as the soundtrack to film crazy guys fishing the LA River.” Well, I was only half right, because I soon realized that music was coming from my own computer, and I was that hipster asshole. Totally busted. I’ll still grab a fish, though. Looks like a good spot for some more Fish Bum stories, if I can ever finish issue #2.

Anyhow, the whole reason I was on (at?) YouTube was to look at this video that my friend sent to me a while ago.

This is pretty crazy. I have to meet a guy like this somehow. Look at the shopping cart moored by the pillar. It’s probably full of lucky rocks.

—hipster asshole, mkl

december fishy-news

Clean up your stuff, the new whitefish, RFA changes its mind on the Fisheries Science Improvement Act…

We’ve entered what we are calling December, though the temperatures are still hovering in the upper 40s. The striped bass season is over and personally, I’m thankful for that since this has been one of my worst years. I won’t get into how many fish I didn’t catch, but I will say I didn’t lose another plug bag to the water or any other things this year. I’m actually trying to unload some gear I’ve acquired over the years here in my NYC rat’s nest and ended up giving my nephew the Shimano Sustain 5000 for Christmas that he can use to catch fluke and snappers. It should be a fun summer for him.

There are a couple news items worth reading this month. The first of which is an article in the NYTimes by Lisa Foderaro concerning the dangers to birds from discarded line and hooks. I’ve always heard this from older fishing figures growing up, with monofilament and plastic six-pack holders the biggest culprits back then. Mono and other line is still a big deal to wildlife and too many fishermen are too careless about letting their loose line fly around the spot or tossing it back into the water.

Bunches of line left on the shore — with or without a hook — can tie ducks, shorebirds and even turtles in knots, while other birds are injured after nibbling a bit of bait left on a hook and swallowing it. Lead sinkers, too, can poison birds that ingest them. Fishermen also cut lines that get snagged on trees, leaving hooks and lures to drift menacingly in the breeze. And some birds will even use fishing line as nesting material, which can ensnare their young.

The problem is not new — or limited to Prospect Park. Birders in other city and state parks report similar cases. The Ocean Conservancy in Washington points out that monofilament fishing line, which is made from an individual fiber of plastic, has been in use since World War II, and as the decades pass, it has accumulated in the water and on land. For a quarter-century, the conservancy has organized coastal cleanups throughout the world on a single day in September. Over that time, 1,340,114 pieces of discarded fishing line have been collected, according to the group.

“Plastics in general are the most persistent forms of marine debris,” said Nicholas Mallos, a conservation biologist with the conservancy. “Once monofilament line becomes loose in the marine environment, it poses a serious threat.”

It’s tough when you have a snag and have to break off, but we should all be conscious about keeping the spot clean and free from loose line and fish guts, and that’s all part of being a responsible human being. Too often we hear about spots getting closed because of litter and it comes down on all of us. It’s not infrequent to see people winding up other people’s loose line at the common fishing spots, but I still can’t understand why they have to. Lots of people will blame immigrants or whatever you want to call the guys keeping short fish and leaving their trash all over the beach (see Jamaica Bay in the spring—that place is a goddamn disgrace to all of us), but it reflects back on all of us as fishermen. The point of it is all of us should be responsible enough to, at the very least, clean up after ourselves.

Another interesting read is a look at the rise and shifts in sourcing of whitefish in the global diet. It’s also from the NYTimes and it’s by Paul Greenberg, the author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. While the cod industry frets over the prospect of increased regulation in the face of what some fishermen are saying are population numbers unprecedented in the last decade, Greenberg says they shouldn’t even worry because cod, as a food staple, is on its way out, to be replaced by tilapia and Pangasius. These two fish are farmed much easier than their wild whitefish relatives. In the case of Pangasius (“a catfish-like creature” from Vietnam—I didn’t know what it was either), the fish can live in extreme close quarters without expensive aerating systems because, when the oxygen is depleted from the water, it just sticks its head through the surface and breathes air. Seems built for industry.

From the article: This irrepressible biological trait (combined with cheap Asian labor and lax environmental standards) has allowed Pangasius to undercut Italian rainbow trout farmers and Greek branzino farmers and has even presaged a re-entry into the American market with the mysterious new name “swai” — now the ninth most consumed fish in America.

What’s curious about both the tilapia and the Pangasius is that they surged in the Western market when the classic fish of the Western whitefish sandwich were encountering troubles. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the world saw a series of wild whitefish collapses, most notably in the North Sea, the Grand Banks of Canada and the famed Georges Bank off Massachusetts. Today, tilapia and Pangasius often account for more than eight billion pounds of whitefish annually — somewhere between a third to a half of all whitefish production, depending on the vagaries of the wild catch.

So whither whitefish in this next weird century of ours? If I were to bet, I’d say the odds are with the warm-water Asian upstarts. Yes, America still harvests two billion to three billion pounds of Alaskan pollock every year (the keystone species in today’s Filet-O-Fish).

Lastly, the RFA vs. Pew Environmental Group row I mentioned in the last post has been resolved, for now anyway. The RFA has changed its position and is now backing the bill’s opponents, though I’m sure there’s no shortage of things for the RFA and Pew to fight about in the near future. From the RFA: “Species like haddock, cod, summer flounder, black sea bass, porgies, amberjack and even king mackerel, these have all been assessed within the past few years so none of them would qualify for statutory assistance under this particular legislation,” said Jim Hutchinson, managing director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA). “East Coast fishermen especially who’ve spearheaded efforts to reform Magnuson, making national headlines through rallies and organized protests, they’ve suddenly found themselves boxed out of the process by Beltway insiders masquerading as reformers.”

Check the last post for information on how to contact your Congressman concerning the FSIA.