While nowhere in the Magnuson Act is it stated or even implied that recreational fishermen should be excluded from the National Standards or from any of the requirements of the Act, in practice commercial fisheries are the only fisheries that it is effectively managing.

This isn't to say that recreational anglers aren't being managed. As a matter of fact, at times it might even seem that the management measures they are forced to contend with are verging on excessive. However, the sum total of all of these measures, in recreational fishery after fishery, still fail to add up to effective management.

Why is this so? The overriding reason is that there is no control of recreational fishing mortality. There are no controls on the number of people who can recreationally fish and there are no controls on what they can catch or when they can catch it. Some coastal states require recreational fishing licenses, but no states limit the number of recreational licenses issued. Some recreational fisheries have closed seasons, but the closures apply only to keeping fish of particular species, not to catching them. Some recreational fisheries have minimum or maximum (or both) size limits, but those size limits apply only to fish that are kept, not to those that are caught. An unlimited number of recreational anglers can fish in any area with any gear at any time, and can catch and release any number of any sized fish of any species, with no constraints imposed on them whatsoever other than those on what they can keep.

But if recreational anglers are out there catching fish, as an overwhelming amount of research in recent years has shown, then they are out there killing fish, no matter how careful they are with their catch and release techniques.

And there are never any "paybacks" for recreational overfishing.

The inability of the managers - adhering to the current philosophy of recreational fishing management - to manage recreational fisheries effectively is seen plainly in popular recreational fisheries like those for summer flounder and striped bass. In the Mid-Atlantic summer flounder fishery, every year for year after year the recreational target quota is exceeded in spite of increasingly stringent bag and season and size limits, and the excess catch is in large part due to the mortality of released fish. And in the striped bass fishery on the East coast the recreational discard mortality in recent years has exceeded the commercial harvest.

But it's most obvious - and most serious - in the offshore fishery for highly migratory species, the so-called "big game" fisheries for tuna and billfish in which the participants venture far offshore in boats valued upwards into the millions of dollars.

The white marlin, a much sought quarry of the "big game" angler, is caught by the same techniques in the same offshore waters in the same seasons as several species of tuna and several other species of Atlantic billfish. While white marlin stocks off the East coast are severely reduced and considered "overfished," there is absolutely no control by the National Marine Fisheries Service on recreational fishing effort. Any recreational angler who wants to (and can afford to) can go out on the ocean and catch as many white marlin as he or she wishes. In fact, every year there are NMFS sanctioned fishing tournaments up and down the coast in which white marlin are the quarry; tournaments in which hundreds of boats participate, hundreds of white marlin are caught, and the largest white marlin killed and landed can win hundreds of thousands of dollars for the angler who caught it.