THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 24, 1996 TAG: 9605240514
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WANCHESE LENGTH: 112 lines
For more than 30 years, James Craddock has earned his living in his boat, catching flounder off North Carolina's coast.
But for the past three months, he says, he hasn't pulled in a penny of profit.
So, on Monday, he plans to head for Georgia's warmer waters and begin searching for shrimp.
Steve Daniels is already down there. He's dragged flounder nets along the mid-Atlantic seaboard for two decades. But since government regulations shut down the fishery March 3, he hasn't made any money.
He left his Wanchese home four days ago and arrived at Georgia's shellfish grounds Thursday. But he hasn't found any shrimp yet - and his wife worries she won't be able to feed her family by fall.
Bill Callaway is setting his sights even farther. His 80-foot boat has been tied to the Wanchese docks for three months - since it's been illegal to drag for flounder. He's considering cruising to Africa to work the unrestricted waters of another continent rather than giving up fishing.
Along the Carolina coast, at least 100 flounder trawlers have left the state or are planning to leave soon. For the first time anyone can remember, flounder fishermen have been forced to abandon their industry and stop catching the profitable, popular flat food fish. If restaurants want to serve flounder this summer, watermen say, cooks will have to prepare frozen fillets - or import them from other countries.
``We've never been shut down like this before,'' Callaway, 41, saidthis week from his Wanchese home. ``Every state is closed to flounder - or limits its catches so much that you can't even pay for gas. The government has this misconception that there aren't any fish out there. There's more flounder than I've seen in years. They just keep making more laws and shutting us down.''
Wanchese fish house owner Willie Etheridge agreed. ``They keep closing us out of one species and forcing everyone on another. There's no reason for that - no scientific evidence,'' Etheridge said. ``With 25 percent of the effort we were putting on flounder 10 years ago, we caught up the entire quota in less than two months this year. That should show someone how many fish are out there in that ocean.''
In an effort to limit flounder catches along the Atlantic Coast, federal fisheries regulators set an 18.5-million-pound cap on the flat food fish this year. About 11.1 million pounds of that quota were earmarked for commercial watermen. The remaining 7.4 million pounds went to recreational anglers, who are still allowed to catch and keep eight flounder each per day.
Biologists with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission's Mid-Atlantic Council divided the commercial quota based on historical landings statistics. North Carolina got the most commercial flounder pounds, 27.4 percent of the overall allocation. Virginia received 21.3 percent of the coast's catch. New Jersey got 16.7 percent of the pounds. Maryland only received 2 percent.
Fisheries regulators in each state decided how their own quotas could be divied up. Some state officials set a daily trip limit on flounder, allowing only 200 to 500 pounds per day to be landed. Other states, like North Carolina, didn't limit the catches by weight or days - allowing watermen to work until their boats were filled.
That, Outer Banks commercial fishermen said, was part of the problem.
``First off, we need more quota. But they ought to have let us spread what we got out some more to extend the season. Trip limits would've helped,'' Craddock, 51, said this week from his Manns Harbor home. ``Oh, man, it's destroyed us. It's really ruined us all. This is the longest my boat's been tied up in 15 years. I just don't know how long we can hang on.''
Last year, North Carolina's watermen were allowed to land 4 million pounds of flounder - and the season stayed open until May 7. This year, federal fisheries regulators gave the state 3 million pounds. North Carolina biologists planned to close the season when 70 percent of the quota had been caught so fishermen could resume working in the fall. By Feb. 23, almost 60 percent of North Carolina's allocation had been landed. One week later, that percentage rose to 74.
Officials shut down the state's season March 3 - allowing only 100 pounds of flounder per trip as a bycatch. By March 8, reports from seafood dealers showed that 102.2 percent of the entire year's allocation had been landed by the season's end. When the final reports came in March 29, almost 700,000 pounds over the quota had been caught.
So North Carolina watermen won't be able to work flounder in the fall. They may even lose 700,000 pounds off their 1997 quota because of the overage. And since other states that still have some flounder allocation left are limiting catches so much, fishermen can't even travel up north to continue trawling along the coast.
``If left unchecked, the fear is that this fishery will go to a collapsed or, at least, over-fished rate,'' North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries biologist supervisor Louis Daniel said Thursday. ``They're trying to decrease the total catch in increments to where only 20 percent of the fishable stock is harvested. This year, the fishermen caught more flounder in two weeks than they had in the former six. It just exploded. Nobody could've forecast this was going to happen.
``We misinterpreted the landings reports,'' said Daniel. ``We didn't want to close people out before it was time. But we sure didn't want them to go over the quota like they did.''
Fishermen agree that they need to have 5.5-inch mesh limits on their nets to allow undersized flounder to swim through. They don't mind the 13-inch size limit on ocean-caught flounder. But they're appalled that state regulators can't manage the decreasing quota better. They're angry that federal biologists keep trying to control catches when there seem to be so many fish out there. And they're afraid of what the future might hold.
``We're in such a state of emergency right now that if we don't have a tremendous summer shrimping season, a lot of guys will lose their houses, their boats and everything else,'' said Wanchese fish dealer Joey Daniels, who serves on North Carolina's Marine Fisheries Commission.
Joe Doak echoed that fear. ``It costs $5,000 at least to re-rig a flounder trawler for shrimping. That's a lot of investment when you haven't earned anything since the end of February,'' said the Wanchese waterman. ``We're all using up our savings big time. I told the kids they better study hard so they don't have to be fishermen.'' ILLUSTRATION: DREW C. WILSON
The Virginian-Pilot
Capt. Tommy Daniels sprays rust preventer on the Gallant Fox. Boat
care makes poor or limited catches all that more expensive. by CNB