Photo of fish kill from Sports Fishing Mag
Commercial fisherman for at least the third time in a month have left a trail of dead and dying striped bass as they culled their catch off Oregon Inlet. Reports of the kill say it was ½ mile wide and 4 miles long !!! NC Marine Fisheries made new rules after the last kill to prevent this from happening again. Well obviously these rules are not enough to protect our valuable resource and something has to be done.
“You can’t allow the use of deadly, indiscriminate and highly destructive trawl nets among large schools of striped bass,” said Jay Dail, CCA North Carolina chairman. “The MFC knows this will happen, yet continues to allow this gear among these schools of valuable fish. It shows how antiquated our management system is – at the very least they should be requiring more selective gear that doesn’t generate tons of wanton waste.”
CCA North Carolina is considering asking the NC Marine Fisheries Commission to completely eliminate trawling as a permissible fishing gear for striped bass. If they do not accept that, anglers will have no choice but to ask that these valuable fish be designated a gamefish and removed from the market entirely.
Unless procedures can be put in place to protect the resource from over harvesting and wasting them I would agree commercial fishing for them should be stopped. A recreational angler can only keep two fish and these trawlers are dumping 100’s if not 1000’s of fish that will not survive.
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