The legal minimum size for summer flounder has reached up to 18 inches this month and so the anglers and recreational fishing businesses have decided to do something about it before they end up in the same boat as New York fishermen. Greg Hueth, a commercial fisherman, told that all the fishermen should stay together as they have a long way to go in this struggle. The summer flounder is in trouble, and our way of life is in jeopardy.
New York state officials have decided to increase the minimum size for fluke there to 20.5 inches, the latest step in an escalation that passed 18 inches a long time ago, and left party-boat operators with near-empty decks. Since scientific advisors warned the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council that the summer flounder population appears to have plateaued, increasing minimum sizes and shortened seasons have become the norm.
Ray Bogan, a Point Pleasant Beach lawyer who’s deeply involved with fisheries issues, told that for years, studies on summer flounder have been peer reviewed, investigated every which way. But intuitively, something seemed to be wrong. Save the Summer Flounder Fishery Fund hired Mark Maunder, senior scientist at the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission and an expert on stock assessment and ecological monitoring. According to Maunder the data regarding 3- and 4-year-old fish — those that are typically targeted by the escalating minimum sizes — have not been properly used in the model that drives the stock assessment.
