Officers' vigilance keeps anglers honest -- and seafood in tight supply
Monday, January 05, 2009 BY BRIAN T. MURRAY
Star-Ledger Staff
Only the most discerning eye would have noticed anything unsavory about the lobster tails on ice recently at the fresh fish counter in a Middletown supermarket.
They belonged to American lobsters, and each was illegally undersized. In New Jersey, that means the sixth abdominal segment -- a band just above the fin-like tail -- must measure at least 1 and one-sixteenth of an inch.
"To be honest, unless you are used to seeing thousands of lobsters, it's difficult, by eye, to tell if the tail is legal or illegal," said Joe Meyer, deputy chief of the Bureau of Law Enforcement for New Jersey's Division of Fish and Wildlife.
But that's part of his job as one of the bureau's 10-member Marine Unit of conservation officers. Along with federal agents, they enforce a complex patchwork of state and federal regulations designed to protect ocean waters from over-fishing, which is reducing an already dwindling seafood supply off the U.S. coast.
U.S. consumers spent $68.4 billion for fishery products in 2007, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. Globally, the illegal, unreported and unregulated ocean fishing business is worth $9 billion a year, according to the federal Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.
For Meyer and his crew, the job is a local one -- probing even the smallest violation by recreational ocean fishermen as well as commercial trawlers, often to find bigger fish.
In the Middletown case, the supermarket was fined and led authorities to a Canadian commercial distributor, ultimately banned from delivering seafood to New Jersey.
Federal and state regulations have become increasingly complex to control the transfer of catches from dock to dinner plate, and pirates are plentiful. Often targeted is the so-called fish of the day.
Tautog, often called blackfish and fetching as much as $10 per pound, is a good example.
"There is an illegal market for live tautog in sushi and Asian markets where people like to pick out their own fish," Meyer said.
Customers also like them small -- under the legal size limit recently increased to 14 inches. The declining species was the subject of several enforcement efforts this past year, including a Cape May case in October, when a husband and wife were found with 30 tautog they caught off a jetty. That was 29 fish over the legal limit, and 20 were illegally undersized.
Yet, that haul amounted to "small fish" compared with the 2,114 pounds of excess fluke, commonly called summer flounder, found a month earlier in Cape May as a commercial fishing rig docked. The fisherman planned to make about $3,000 selling it in Virginia.
"Where the general public sees a fish, most commercial fishermen -- people who make their livelihoods fishing -- see a dollar bill. Not that they wouldn't appreciate the species or anything, but it's a business to them," said Scott Doyle, supervising criminal investigator for NOAA's Northeast enforcement division.
"So, if you are limited to a 400-pound haul, but you bring aboard 500 pounds, how do you throw those extra dollar bills overboard? Honest fishermen do it. Some don't," he said.
Another factor in that equation is competition from cheaper imports from foreign fisheries, which aren't as tightly regulated.
"If you get away with it, it's substantial money," said Tim Cussens, chief of the state law enforcement bureau. "But in the fluke case, the captain now faces fines of $3,000 and a 60-day suspension of his New Jersey fluke landing permit."
That's what investigators call their "hammer."
The permit loss means a commercial fishing vessel sits at a dock, not making money. But some remain undeterred.
In July, New Jersey marine officers stopped the vessel Two Brothers as it landed from a sea scallop trip in Wildwood. It allegedly held an overage of scallops -- 71 pounds more than the 400 pounds the vessel was permitted to collect that day, all hidden and not listed as required in a federal fishing log, according to charges filed. The owner of the Two Brothers could not be reached comment.
The boat was one of three linked in 2004 to illegal sea scallop fishing by a family of fishermen who operated a Wildwood seafood dealer called Capt'n Charlie's Clams. On just one day, officers said, they watched two vessels unload a combined shipment of 2,349 pounds of Atlantic sea scallops --more than 1,500 pounds than permitted -- that were taken to Fulton Fish Market in New York for sale.
Nearly $1 million in fines and several years of suspensions were leveled, which NOAA and New Jersey conservation officers said at the time was the largest penalty ever assessed on the Atlantic Coast. While the fine was reduced to $75,000 under a 2006 settlement, Capt'n Charlie's lost its license to deal in seafood for 10 years, the family was forced to sell one of its three vessels and they had to alternate the use of their two remaining vessels for a two-year period.
That settlement may now be revised because of the new charges, authorities said.
"Right now, the standard price you will bring in on scallops is about $5 to $7 per pound, so if you're bringing in an extra 1,000 pounds over the legal limit in a week, you can get an extra $7,000," said Doyle of the NOAA. "But the risk and rewards are not worth it."
Meyer of the state division said recreational fishermen, and the restaurants willing to illegally trade in seafood, can be just as bad.
"We just found 335 sublegal sea bass in one recreational fishing boat," he explained. "To have a party boat with 335 undersized fish is a lot more greedy than a commercial fisherman dragging in too many fluke."
His office spent months probing a recreational boat out of Wildwood Crest this year, focusing on a fisherman who illegally sold sea bass to restaurants. Six others were later nabbed, including the owners of three restaurants in Camden and Gloucester counties that purchased the illegal sea bass. One business had openly advertised the fish as a dinner special.
Doyle of the NOAA said state and federal agents are getting better at catching pirates on both ends of the trade.
"Just because we don't catch you today doesn't mean we won't tomorrow," he said. "And we will do some forensic accounting to get you for the fish you illegally took today and yesterday."
