NY Commercial fishermen reeling from shutdown of fluke fishery
It was the busy Labor Day Weekend, and Southold Fish Market owner Charlie Manwaring had been forced to stock his popular East End restaurant and market with out-of-state fluke for the first time in recent memory. “This is my backyard, and on a holiday weekend I have no fluke,” he complained to Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley) at a meeting Friday morning with two dozen angry Long Island fishermen and women at the Mattituck fishing dock. “I have to rely on Rhode Island and Jersey and Massachusetts and Carolina.”. “The fluke paid our bills,” said Cindy Kaminsky, who fishes commercially out of Mattituck.,,, “Nobody’s been willing to stand up and say to lawmakers, ‘You need to make this fair to New York fishermen,’ ” said Southampton attorney Dan Rodgers of New York Fish, an advocacy group. click here to read the story 17:42
On your fluke article RI has been closed and when open was 4 days a week @ 50 lbs. NC has half as many permits as NY and the last opening was 1 trip @ 6000 lbs from April 7 to September 30, 5 months and 23 days average of 34 lbs a day. To qualify in NC you had to have landed a certain poundage in 2 out 3 specific years. NY you only had to have a food fish permit. Some of the people complaining would not have qualified using NC criteria.
To land fluke in other states it is much stricter than NY and NY fishermen would be complaining about that too. As for going out of compliance that only works for state permitted only anyone with a federal permit would be punished for the non compliance of the state boats.
NY fishermen could have done more to further their case by submitting their catch history to the DEC but they didn’t want anyone knowing what they were doing or they had no catch history. This what Massachusetts did. Mark Phillips
well Put Mark,even though NC caught fish off NY…..they Carried records back and Filed them…..