Snapper Season Shift Threatens Championship
By DAVID RAINER
Just when the Orange Beach fishing community thought it had made a tasty batch of lemonade from National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) lemons, it appears the jug could possibly spring a leak.
Earlier this year, NMFS announced the dates for red snapper season as June 1 through Sept. 30 – dates that exclude the traditional spring dates of the hugely successful Red Snapper World Championship, which has been held in Orange Beach for the past four years.
Members of the Orange Beach community and tournament organizers got their heads together and decided to make the aforementioned lemonade by unveiling the new Saltwater Series tournament, which would include species other than red snapper, from April 4 through May 26. To accommodate the new federal season, the Red Snapper World Championship was moved to Aug. 22 to Sept. 30.
Everything looked rosy until the states of Florida and Texas decided to keep last season’s dates in their respective state waters, which have a nine-mile limits. Alabama’s state waters only reach three miles into the Gulf of Mexico, which precludes any meaningful red snapper fishing.
Because of the decision of Florida and Texas to not change their seasons to mesh with the federal season, NMFS now says the recreational fishing quota of about 2.2 million pounds will be reached much earlier and may change the federal red snapper season to June 1 through Aug. 5, which will throw all the Red Snapper World Championship plans out the window.
Capt. Maurice Fitzsimons, one of the tournament organizers, said although the Saltwater Series tournament is full speed ahead, the Red Snapper World Championship is currently in a state of flux because of the mandates of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.
“We’re still considering our options,” said Fitzsimons, who runs the charter boat Miss Celeste. “There is a bill in Congress right now that would allow recreational fishing as long as the fish species is in recovery, like red snapper is. We’ve been in touch with Congressman Jo Bonner. We’ve got a shot at getting it through, but trying to buck anything in Magnuson-Stevens is a major hurdle.”
Fitzsimons said Monday morning that there is a lot more at stake than the snapper tournament.
“It’s getting critical down here,” he said of the Alabama Gulf Coast. “If this last deal goes through, we’re down to 65 days of snapper season. I can’t even imagine what that’s going to do down here. They’ve killed the spring and fall and you can’t make it on two months of tourists.”
Vernon Minton, director of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ Marine Resources Division, agreed that the Magnuson-Stevens Act is the crucial factor in this battle for Alabama’s charter fleet to stay afloat.
“The problem is in the reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens Act, there was language put in to manage species that are overfished are undergoing overfishing,” Minton explained. “The act says you have to stop overfishing by 2010. I can’t figure out any basis in that drop-dead date in science. Obviously certain species are different in terms of growth, fecundity (reproduction capacity) and age at reproduction. There are a lot of differences.
“But the 2010 date was the stake driven in the ground. In order to meet that, there have had to be very drastic changes. The red snapper quotas for commercial and recreational were severely cut from 9.12 million pounds to 4.5 million. NMFS has said the 2007 quota was overrun by 500,000 pounds. That was primarily due to Florida and Texas leaving their waters open. If Florida doesn’t rescind the current regs to be in line with the federal regs, the NMFS analysis shows we will have to go to a June 1 to August 5 season. So that’s what’s got everything in an uproar right now.”
Obviously, Alabama’s three-mile limit on state waters holds only a few red snapper. However, that doesn’t mean Alabama anglers can’t catch fish in Florida waters.
“If a person goes to Florida and is properly licensed in Florida and comes back to Alabama and is properly licensed in Alabama, there is nothing we can say,” said Minton, a member of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council.
But Minton also knows the fish Alabama anglers catch in Florida is not going to solve the dilemma.
“The charter guys are all upset,” he said. “They’re out of business, I’m afraid, if something doesn’t change. If the Aug. 5 holds, it’s going to put a lot of folks out of business. It will have a snowball effect on the associated industries – marinas, boat sales, right on down through motels, condos and restaurants.
“I talked with Bobbi Walker (Orange Beach Fishing Association) and she said we’ve lost 11 or 12 boats already. That number is going to climb if this new season holds. People are not going to be able to run their boats or they may be repossessed. I don’t know how a guy is going to make payments.”
The State of Alabama is also going to lose out, as well, if the snapper championship can’t be held. A portion of the money raised by the tournament goes toward building artificial reefs off the Alabama Coast, not to mention the economic boost.
“It’s brought in tremendous revenue in terms of people brought into the area,” Minton said. “And we have partnered with them, utilizing federal funds and taken $50,000 and matched that with $150,000. We have created a system of reefs where a normal guy can go to spot with the reasonable expectation of finding red snapper. Several fish on last year’s leaderboard were caught off these reefs built with the funds from Marine Resources and the Red Snapper World Championship.”
Since the tournament’s inception, 864 reefs have been built with those funds.
“The area of our artificial reef zones is about 1,200 square miles,” Minton said. “There have been estimates of how many reefs are out there. There are 20,000 out there probably. We set them up in grid patterns so you could work along a line and when you find fish, you can move east and west so you could concentrate on that depth profile that was producing active fish.”
Even though the snapper season will be closed, Minton knows there is going to be red snapper mortality.
“People are going to fish,” he said. “We’re going to have fish being killed. They’re going to try to catch amberjack, grouper, beeliners and triggerfish to try to make a trip. If they catch snapper, which they will, a lot of them are not going to survive. Mortality increases significantly once you get past 100 to 120 feet.
“The law has to be changed before there is a solution. The 2010 drop-dead date and some of the other rebuilding parameters are going to have to be adjusted. The stock is improving, that’s what we need to work on. When red snapper were deemed to be overfished, the spawning biomass was at 0.4 percent. Now it’s at 3 percent. That’s eight times more than it was. To me, that’s significant progress. The other part of that, we don’t know if the standard they’re trying to get if the Gulf will survive. There will be so many snapper out nothing else will survive. They’ve got to eat something – each other, I guess