Expert believe that thousands of dead fish found floating were because of commercial fishermen in the Outer Banks. The striped bass brings a lot of money to the region’s economy, but lately they’ve become the focus of controversy after dead fish washed ashore twice.
The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries currently limits commercial trawlers to 2,000 pounds of striped bass per day. If a boat catches over the limit, the law allows the vessel to transfer the extra to another trawler, again up to 2,000 pounds. Anything over the limit must be discarded. The result is the dead fish.
Commercial fisherman Jamie Daniels said that seeing dead fish floating means that we are killing them but in actual we are not. But on January 15, according to the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, Jamie Daniels discarded thousands of striped bass from his fishing trawler, the Jamie Lynn.
Another commercial fisherman John O’Keefe said lot of laws does not make any sense and thus create issue like this. North Carolina is one of only three Atlantic Coast states that allows trawling for stripers. Trawling with nets capable of catching thousands of pounds of fish more than the law permits for that species. Critics say it’s like using a cannon to kill a fly.
Michael Daniels, Manager of Wanchese Fishing Company said that the figure shows that commercial fishing is not the problem but dead discards. A recent study by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission shows that coast wide, the commercial fishing trawlers harvested more than a million striped bass in 2008.
