Call To Action

THE MODERN FISH ACT COULD BRING MAJOR BENEFITS TO SALTWATER ANGLERS.

- John Brownlee

This past December, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources approved H.R. 200, a bill of vital importance to recreational anglers. This bill amends the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to relieve restrictions on fishery managers and provide some stability for fishermen in terms of annual seasons and/or bag limits.

Congressman Garret Graves had introduced H.R. 2023, the Modern Fish Act, earlier in the year to address challenges recreational fishermen have always faced in the federal fisheries management system. He was joined by a bipartisan list of 24 cosponsors. Original cosponsors include Congressmen Gene Green, Daniel Webster, and Rob Wittman. The Modern Fish Act’s legislative language was ultimately included in H.R. 200.

So what, specifically, does this mean for us as recreational anglers? Here are some highlights.

The bill would require fishery managers in the southeastern U.S. to perform long-overdue examinations of fishery allocations, based on modern criteria. Allocations between the commercial and recreational sectors have often been written in stone and rarely revisited, even as changes occur rapidly in the way fisheries are harvested in the real world.

It would also allow for recreational fisheries to be managed using more appropriate management tools—for example, seasonal closures and bag limits instead of attempting to count hard annual landings of individual species, as is often the case in commercial fisheries. This could be accomplished by modifying the current annual catch limit (ACL) requirement to allow for more adaptive approaches.