Needless to say, the opposition by the recreational fishing groups was ostensibly based on conservation. Article after article, web page after web page, rant after rant claimed that allowing the longliners into these areas would result in horrendous bycatch levels – primarily of other highly migratory species (tunas, sailfish, marlin, sharks and swordfish) and sea turtles.

In actuality, estimates were that on the order of 75 white marlin, 50 blue marlin and under 20 sea turtles would have been caught inadvertently in the experimental fishery, divided equally between open and closed areas. Using the latest bycatch reduction gear and techniques, which are mandatory in the pelagic longline fishery, the mortality of the turtles would have been negligible, and most of the marlin would have survived capture.

So the recreational fishing groups that were so concerned about the impacts on marlin and sea turtle conservation in these closed areas went to a tremendous effort to save perhaps a couple of marlin and no sea turtles whatsoever.

They were successful. The experimental fishery in the closed areas wasn’t allowed.

The “Big Game” fishing tournament scene 

A few months later approximately 450 recreational fishing boats participated in this year’s White Marlin Open, a recreational fishing tournament held annually in Ocean City, Maryland. Most of them fished for 3 days. The primary quarry was white marlin, but there were also prize categories for other “big game” species.

The prize awarded for the largest white marlin killed was $1,650,000. The fish weighed seventy-eight and a half pounds. (For what is perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about big time tournament sports angling, you can visit the tournament website at http://www.whitemarlinopen.com/.)

During the tournament, 486 white marlin were caught and released and 13 were killed outright (“boated” in the politically aware vernacular of fishing tournaments). For blue marlin, 79 were released and 3 were killed.

But when it comes to catching white marlin, the anglers in the Ocean City tournament evidently aren’t all that good (although the money certainly is). On the first day of the Pirate’s Cove (North Carolina) Billfish Tournament a week or so later, the 115 boats that fished caught 129 white marlin (http://www.pcbgt.com/day4standings05.pdf). During the entire tournament the 123 boats that were entered caught 488 white marlin and 35 blue marlin. All of the white marlin caught were released, and all but 2 of the blue marlin were released.

And bringing up the rear for this two week period of tournament activity was the Mid-Atlantic $500,000 fished out of Cape May, NJ and Ocean City, MD. One hundred and sixty-nine boats caught 220 white marlin and 27 blue marlin, with 11 white marlin and 4 blue marlin “boated.” (http://www.tournamentlive.com/index.php )

In total, during these three tournaments 1,194 white marlin and 135 blue marlin were caught and released while 24 white marlin and 9 blue marlin were killed and brought to the dock.

Live to fight another day?

While no one can accurately predict how many of the marlin that were released subsequently succumbed to the trauma of being caught, estimates of white marlin “catch and release” mortality range up to 59%, depending upon the gear that is used and the techniques that are employed to do the catching (see Application of pop-up satellite archival tag technology to estimate postrelease survival of white marlin [Tetrapturus albidus] caught on circle and straight-shank [“J”] hooks in the western North Atlantic recreational fishery by A. Horodysky and J. Graves and available at http://fishbull.noaa.gov/1031/horo.pdf.) This means that during these three tournaments, in addition to the 24 white marlin that were definitely killed (or “boated,” if you would rather employ the tournament organizers’ feel-good euphemism), another 700 could have been killed, along with an additional 70 or so blue marlin, through injuries sustained while they were being “fought” to boatside. (See also http://www.fishingnj.org/pdfs/LifeAfterCandR.pdf .)

To save readers from doing the math, that works out to one marlin killed for every three to four days that each boat fished (the Asbury Park Press reported a catch rate of one marlin per boat per day in the 1999 Cape May tournament).

This was just for three tournaments. In both 2003 and 2004 there were over 200 fishing tournaments for highly migratory species held in the United States’ EEZ. In every one of these tournaments, points or prizes were offered for both blue and white marlin, so we can safely infer that these species were targeted in all of them.

But not all of the boats that fish for marlin do so in tournaments. There are thousands that don’t. And the boats that compete in the tournaments certainly fish for marlin outside the tournaments as well.

So how many recreational fishing boats are there that are actually targeting marlin? No one seems to be counting. How many days a year do they fish for marlin? No one seems to be keeping track. How many marlin are they catching? How many marlin are they killing? When it comes to recreational “big game” fishing, the questions seem to go on and on and on. The answers definitely don’t.

It’s generally accepted that the use of circle hooks greatly reduces the catch and release marlin mortality. Consider that if circle hooks were used in the three tournaments discussed above, the marlin mortality – exclusive of those fish purposely killed – would be far, far less than 700 fish. As Horodysky and Graves determined, catch and release marlin mortality using traditional “J” hooks can be over 50%. So, it would seem that mandating the use of circle hooks, something that the commercial longline fleet enthusiastically accepted last year, would be a no-brainer for the supposedly conservation minded recreational anglers. (In case you aren’t aware of how “conservation-minded” these big game anglers are, Jeff Merrill wrote in an Asbury Park Press article “Big fish, big bucks,” that Cape May tournament organizer Dick Weber “has always been a strong believer in fisheries conservation in general and billfish conservation in particular, and this tournament has donated well over $1 million to fisheries' conservation organizations since its inception.” We’d bet dollars to donuts that a big chunk of that money went to the Recreational Fishing Alliance, a “conservation” organization headed by Viking Yachts – see below - chairman Bob Healey, that claimed credit for stopping the experimental longline fishery described above from taking place.)

So what’s being done to guarantee the conservation of these marlin, other than the questionable move of shutting down an experimental fishery designed to reduce longline bycatch even farther than it has been already through the mandatory use of state-of-the-art gear and techniques? According to Dick Weber in the same Asbury Park Press article, "We are actively considering the mandatory use of circle hooks with natural baits and may implement it for the tournament in the future even before NMFS requires us to do so."

Dare we point out that “active consideration” of a conservation technique, no matter how active, has not yet been shown to save any fish. The National Marine Fisheries Service is currently proposing that the use of circle hooks be mandatory in the recreational white marlin fishery when bait is being used and the Recreational Fishing Alliance is, according to John Geiser writing in the Asbury Park Press on September 25, opposed. Mr. Geiser quotes Jim Donofrio, Alliance Executive Director, “while the RFA supports the continued conservation ethic that has resulted in 99 percent catch-and-release rates for billfish, we are opposed to making the use of circle hooks mandatory,” Though the RFA did support the mandatory use of circle hooks in a small recreational fishery targeting spawning striped bass in the Delaware River, they are unaccountably unwilling to extend the same conservation benefits, benefits that the commercial longliners have fully embraced and have been trying to improve upon over the opposition of the RFA, to the marlin that are the quarry of the big game fishing crowd.

And that good old conservation ethic resulting in “99 percent catch- and-release rates” isn’t all that effective either, particularly when over half of the fish that are released can end up dead. The RFA is also opposing the NMFS proposal to cap annual recreational marlin landings at 250 fish, claiming that recreational fishing isn’t the problem, commercial fishing is. But what’s a dead marlin or two, or two or three hundred, when recreational anglers are the folks who are doing the killing? After all, they’re doing it through “catch and release,” and it seems that we’re all supposed to think that doesn’t result in dead fish.