WYE MILLS, Md. — October 3, 2014 — There are many options in front of the commercial striped bass fishery right now.
Striped bass, known as rockfish, are said by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to be on a downward trend toward overfishing, although overfishing is not occurring.
ASMFC hopes to turn the trend around, after all the effort put in to date to recover the rockfish population, according to Mike Waine, the fishery management plan coordinator at the ASMFC.
The ASMFC's striped bass management board is considering three options to reduce the striped bass fishery both coastwide and in the Chesapeake Bay. The board is expected to decide at a conference in late October whether it wants to spread out the regulations over three years or make the whole reduction in one year.
"There are a lot of different perspectives of what should be done, and not everybody agrees with each other, and that's usually the case," Maryland Department of Natural Resources Fisheries Service Director Tom O'Connell said Thursday, Sept. 25, at Chesapeake College at a public hearing held on the proposed regulations.
He encouraged the watermen in the room to maintain a productive conversation with Waine, who was presenting the proposals for ASMFC.
Read the full story from The Star Democrat