NMFS announcement indicated that the under harvest of tuna would be carried over to the 2008 season. It means that NMFS would allow the extra fish to recreational anglers to enjoy a year-round season and a bag limit of one school, and two large school/small mediums. The three-fish per boat catch limit is a far cry from the one fish per person limit that anglers used to enjoy long before. Now they think that a three-fish limit was indeed something they could live with.
Last week NMFS published another notice on bluefin tuna stating that, “In response to recently available Atlantic bluefin tuna recreational landing in 2007, NMFS has decided to reduce the retention limit of large school/small medium bluefin tuna from two fish to one fish.”
This worries fishermen, who claimed that instead of saying underharvest NMFS mentioned overharvest of bluefin tuna and crunching the numbers on a new batch of landings data. They are complaining that instead of getting a larger chunk of quota to draw from this season, NMFS giving us a smaller slice of the pie.
