Fish Rules

Short post today as this blog writer is travelling in Costa Rica. The day before I left I was talking to a fisherman from Gloucester who is not a CAFC fisherman. We had an extensive conversation about fisheries regulations - which I will post some video of in the coming weeks. One of the points he made stands out.

He noted that 80% of the seafood in the US is imported and that most if not all of those fisheries are LESS regulated than the Northwest Atlantic groundfishery. In fact the New England groundfish fleet might well be the most regulated fishery in the world.

Now I dont know if that is statistically true, but we do know that most other countries do not regualte their fisheries as tightly as the US. Here in Costa Rica I went fishing with a commercial fisherman from a very small town on the Pacific coast in his Panga. We caught a number of small yellowfin tuna. When I asked the fisherman what the size limit was for yellowfin he just stared at me blankly.

"Size limit?" he said.
"Yeah, do you have any rules about how big fish have to be to keep them?" I asked.
He laughed and said, "Maybe they do, but no one knows them. Who is there to enforce that?"

In the US, fisherman endure a sea of rules about how they fish, what they fish for, how big the fish have to be to keep, how many they can catch and when and where they can fish. Enforcing those rules are th National Marine Fisheries Service, On-board observers, Dockside monitors, the Coast Guard, and beyond all that fishermen have a slew of mandated safety regulations the costs of which are in the thousands of dollars.

The point? As always, eat local fish!