Spent the better part of Wednesday in Philadelphia with my cousin Willie and Capt. Adam at the advisors meeting.
While the "official" report will be sent out to council members the week before the next MAFMC meeting (December 8th is the first day of the meeting by the way) and will be available at the Council meeting on December 8th, here is my "unofficial" report.
Summer Flounder - Every state advisor except NY was in favor of maintaining Conservation Equivalency. To those that might not know, that means each state setting its own regulations.
New York advisor was in favor of a single, coastwide management plan (which was expected)
Scup - The advisors, amongst recommending other things, unanimously recommended status quo on the regs until such time as the MAFMC sends the quota recommendation from the SSC
BACK TO THE SSC and the Monitoring Committee!Sea Bass - The advisors, amongst recommending other things, unanimously recommended status quo on the regs until such time as the MAFMC sends the quota recommendation from the
SSC BACK TO THE SSC and the Monitoring Committee!We have reached a point where "settling" for the scraps we are thrown can no longer be tolerated, and no one was willing to even discuss the ridiculous options we are being offered.
(I will start another post when I have a chance later today with the "options" for the various fisheries, which of course are only preliminary recommendations from staff. They may change between now and December 8th as landings #'s come in.)With both Porgies and Sea Bass we have a peer reviewed stock assessment that says the stocks are NOT over fished and are ABOVE their rebuilt targets, but still have a quota that, for Sea Bass, is the same as it was for an overfished and non-rebuilt stock and for Scup that is literally a FRACTION of what the science says it should be.
Time to go back to work, talk later!
