PART 3 - RIDING SHOTGUN OFF A 'FISHERIES CLIFF'
One of the most popular trips for most any U.S. angler is probably the drive itself from Miami down U.S. 1 to Islamorada in the Florida Keys. No matter where you come from in terms of flights - or your options afterwards - the 74.5-mile drive from Miami to the 'sportfishing capital of the world' is 1 hour, 30 minutes of excited anticipation that has been made by literally millions of anglers over the past century.

So here's a question; if a cab driver outside Miami airport told you he could make that drive down U.S. 1 to Islamorada in just 30 minutes, would you feel comfortable hopping in the back seat? Think that would be a safe, responsible decision? If the ultimate goal is reaching your destination, what's the difference if takes an hour and a half or even 2-1/2 hours?

According to the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA), one of the biggest absurdities in fisheries management over the last decade is incorporation of mandatory, time-certain deadlines for rebuilding schedules. If a stock of fish is actively rebounding and the population growing positively every year, why would the need to meet a government-ordered, absolute statistical figure within a time-certain deadline be more important than actually reaching that goal?

It begs the question - why does the federal government give fixed, arbitrary deadlines for the natural world to follow anyway, given that nature has no such reactive timeframes? Best put by Thomas Jefferson, "If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread."

ENVIRONMENTALISTS AGREE, FLEXIBILITY WORKS
When the Magnuson Stevens Act was reauthorized by Congress in 2006, key lawmakers from New Jersey and New York successfully fought to include a provision for extension of the arbitrary rebuilding timeframe for summer flounder by 3 more years. By order of a strict and inflexible 10-year rebuilding deadline, the Atlantic coastal summer flounder stock was originally given a target to be met by 2010; the additional 36 months would become a Godsend to East Coast anglers able to keep fishing while the stock biomass increased.

By act of Congress, key language within the newly authorized federal fisheries law allowed the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to extend the end of the time period for reaching final biomass target until 2013, allowing anglers access to this iconic Mid Atlantic species while the stock continued to grow. "Instead of letting our summer flounder fishery collapse and have coastal fishermen suffer through a moratorium on fluke fishing, several key legislators in the Northeast were able keep our rebuilding periods going for a few years," said RFA executive director Jim Donofrio in August of 2010, adding "without this deadline extension, we would've had no fishery whatsoever at that point in the process."

By incorporating that flexibility to keep anglers angling while the stock continued to rebuild, Donofrio said that statutory definitions of overfishing and overfished stocks were still met, while businesses did not have to close their doors to the angling community in order to achieve the goal. Regrettably, this was not an option for regional council members to decide, nor was it a possibility for NOAA Fisheries to decide on their own. Essentially, only by congressional mandate was this balance of commerce and conservation allowed to continue in a more flexible fashion.

In a bulletin issued at the time, RFA criticized the environmental organizations including Pew Environment Group who have fervently fought efforts to incorporate limited management flexibility in other coastal fisheries in order to allow anglers the opportunity to fish for certain species while stocks were positively rebounding. "The lobbyists at Pew, Environmental Defense Fund and the Marine Fish Conservation Network were quick to credit strengthened rebuilding plans for summer flounder success, yet this fishery was fully restored to the healthiest of levels while fishermen kept on fishing and only thanks to congressional flexibility," said Donofrio. "Given what's happening now with other coastal fisheries, that's about as absurd as it gets."

Today, strict rebuilding deadlines for fisheries like Gulf of Maine cod (10 years), South Atlantic snowy grouper (34 years), Pacific Coast yelloweye rockfish (82 years) and red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico (31 years) are key factors in the setting of annual catch limits for individual anglers, with periodic stock assessments ultimately determining whether these deadlines will be met or not.

"All it takes is a couple of bad trawl surveys or a weird anomaly in the fatally flawed recreational harvest information, and suddenly that bar graph isn't going up as sharply as you're supposed to in the time allowed, and next thing you know your season is closed," Donofrio added. "With time-constraints ranging from 1 year to over 80 years, it's hard to believe some folks really continue to support these fixed, non-scientific deadlines without debate."
An especially troubling report out of the Gulf of Mexico where abandoned oil and gas rigs are being blown up as part of the U.S. Interior Department's "Idle Iron" program puts even more of a negative spotlight on the unscientific policies embraced by the federal government. Undercover video obtained by Local 15 News shows thousands of pounds of dead fish, mostly red snapper, floating to the surface after a controversial demolition in the Gulf.

"You have NOAA and the Commerce Department telling anglers they can only fish for red snapper 27 days this season because of rebuilding requirements, yet the Interior Department is killing hundreds of thousands of pounds of red snapper each year and destroying critical marine habitat, where's the science in that," Donofrio asked.

At a 2011 Massachusetts field hearing, outgoing NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco testified how the 10-year rebuilding figure had never been based on science or scientific formula, a fact later substantiated to a House Natural Resources Committee Hearing when one of the legislators responsible for incorporating the 3-year rebuilding extension in the summer flounder fishery noted that it was actually members of Congress who came up the '10' figure.

"Fishermen live and die by science, so yes these random timeframes and arbitrary demolition efforts are literally killing both the fish and the recreational fishing industry," Donofrio said. "Anglers would like to see a better balance of commerce and conservation, yet these federal policies run completely counter to responsible fisheries management today.

Unrealistic, non-scientific deadlines are like blowing through crosswalks, traffic lights and intersections, just to shave an extra couple of minutes from the length of the drive - it puts everyone and everything else in harm's way. When you watch video of the Interior Department blowing up fish habitat and destroying hundreds of thousands of pounds of red snapper, while the Commerce Department continues to take away fishing days for anglers, you start to wonder who's really in the driver seat here anyway?