JCAA Press Release:
NOAA Unfairly Shuts Down Black Sea Bass
October 1, 2009

NOAA announced on September 30th that they were going to close the black sea bass fishery for 180 days starting October 5th. The stated reason is that preliminary data suggests that the recreational sector will over harvest the 2009 quota. What the NOAA release failed to state is the fact that the quota in 2009 was set too low and they are allowing the same low quota to be in place for 2010.They set the original quota in 2008 believing the stock was being overfished and overfishing was taking place. They raised the recreational size limit to 12 ½" to implement the smaller quota.

In 2008, after the new stock assessment was published and it stated that the stock was not overfished and overfishing was not occurring, NOAA did not raise the quota in response to this new information. Instead they kept an arbitrarily low quota that guaranteed overharvesting since it did not take into consideration that the stocks were larger than the they estimated. They did leave the higher 12 ½ inch size limit in place.

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