Federal officials have said for years that Gulf of Mexico red snapper are overfished, but tell that to the anglers catching and releasing dozens to build limits around Louisiana’s offshore oil rigs.
Current red snapper regulations seem ridiculous to anglers who have spent any time probing the hundreds of oil rigs off Louisiana’s coastline. Make a pass around almost any of these structures, and just watch the fish finder: Fish are everywhere.Drop a piece of cut bait, and the odds are you’ll pull up a red snapper. Re-rig more bait, count down to the same depth and the exercise repeats itself — again and again and again.
Back in the late 1970s, when there were no red snapper limits, anglers would go home with locker freezers strapped to their flatbed trucks that were full of the succulent fish. Many would make only one trip a year, perhaps spending a day with legendary skipper Charlie Hardison, but families would eat for months on the rewards.
It’s probably a good thing that anglers are no longer allowed to keep everything that touches a hook, but red snapper still seem far from endangered. In fact, they’ve become a nuisance.
“There’s too damned many of them,” Cajunmade Charters’ Capt. Chris Moran said. “They’re in the way.”
Moran said snapper were absolutely swarming the rigs from West Delta to Eugene Island in April, and that it would be no challenge to catch them once the season opens this month.
“When you’re mangrove (snapper) fishing, (red snapper) swim to the top,” he said. “You can free-gaff your limit (of red snapper) for the whole boat. I’ve never in my whole life seen snapper like this.
“I can take you right now and catch 12 25-pounders, and be back in time for lunch.”
But inexplicably, red snapper have been declared overfished since the 1980s, when the first Reef Fish Management Plan was enacted. Since then, anglers have watched as regulations have tightened. Minimum-size limits have increased, total allowable catch has decreased and daily creels have become laughable.
The species, once one of the stars of the offshore charter industry, has become inconsequential, pushed to insignificance by what appears to be unnecessarily strict regulation.
Who’s going to spend the time and money to go offshore for two red snapper? Especially when it’s a no-brainer to catch dozens. Especially when filling the paltry two-fish limit could mean catching and releasing dozens of undersized fish with bulging eyes and distended stomachs.
Moran said the regulations have forced charter captains and individual recreational anglers to adjust.
“We don’t target red snapper,” he said. “You go do your amberjack fishing and whatever else, and you’re going to catch your snapper.”
But the fact is that people want snapper, so it remains an important part of the recreational offshore fishing scene.
“It’s one of those fish that everybody wants to catch, and a lot of people won’t go fishing if they can’t catch their two snapper,” Moran said.
And this year seems to be the low point in red snapper fishing with a paltry 76-day season stretching from June 1 through Aug. 15.
So what’s the deal? Is Louisiana just so blessed with an overabundance of red snapper, as it is with fertile coastal marshes teeming with all manner of fish to the envy of every other Gulf state, that we are missing the big picture? Is the species really on the verge of collapse?
Or have the management schemes become outdated?
Well, Louisiana certainly has been a focal point of snapper fishing, and for years stood in contrast to fairly modest populations throughout the rest of the Gulf. However, over the past decade or so, the species has made a huge surge in population as anglers and state managers in every coastal state recognized that it was the artificial habitat that has sustained Louisiana’s catches.
“There are now 20,000 artificial reefs off the Alabama coast,” said Bob Shipp, chairman of the University of South Alabama’s Department of Marine Sciences and director of the Alabama Center of Estuarine Studies. “We have a 1,200-square-mile area of the coastal waters that is set aside for artificial reefs.”
Florida has followed suit, establishing artificial reefs off both its coasts to provide increased habitat for red snapper and other reef fish.
Add all of those artificial reefs to the 4,500 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (many off the Louisiana coast), and there is a plethora of habitat for a species that depends on structure for its existence.
And Shipp believes that this proliferation of artificial habitat is key to the future of red snapper management.
“There are more snapper than in the history of the Gulf,” he said.
In fact, National Marine Fisheries Southeast Region Administrator Roy Crabtree said there’s no doubt the population has exploded.
“Based on what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing (in the scientific data), it seems we are improving the stock,” Crabtree said. “I think the fact that (anglers) are catching a lot of fish is a good sign.”
Shipp pointed out that even anglers in much of the waters along the Florida west coast, where historically the species only existed near the western Panhandle, are now catching snapper with frequency.
“On the Florida west coast, in the Big Bend area, they have never seen so many snapper,” he explained.
The expansion is even more telling off the coast of Texas.
“Historically, there was no (snapper) in the northwest Gulf,” Shipp said.
While Crabtree acknowledged the upward trend, he said increased habitat isn’t the only factor in the expansion.
“What we’re trying to accomplish (with regulations) seems to be working,” he said. “You can have your differences with how it’s done, but it does seem to be working.”
The problem is that recreational anglers have consistently overshot the allotted harvest quotas by big numbers, according to National Marine Fisheries Service estimates. Estimates show recreational anglers landed more than their allotment in 12 of the past 19 years, with five of those overages topping a million pounds.
Commercial fishermen went over their TAC in 10 of the past 19 years, but only once (in 1992) did those overages even approach a million pounds.
That might be so, some in the recreational sector admit, but there is a fear that some of the stringent regulations are driving the charter industry into collapse.
Moran, for example, said he really doesn’t have a problem with the two-fish limit; it’s the ridiculously short season that worries him.
“It’s killing the industry because usually by the third week of April (large numbers of customers are) down here,” he said. “Now people aren’t in a hurry to get down here until June.”
He said that means his boats, and the boats of other charter captains, have often remained idled during the months leading up to the season opening.
“You can’t crush an industry to reach a goal by 2010 when you see a (fish) population increasing,” Moran said.
The importance of snapper to the charter industry might be strange, considering the fact that the daily bag is so small, but Moran said snapper remains a glory fish.
“If one 20-pound snapper hits the deck of the boat, (customers) will talk about it at work for four weeks,” he said. “If they catch 60 triggerfish, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, we killed the triggerfish,’ but they’ll talk about that one snapper.
“It’s an unbelievable tourist attraction.”
