Article by Capt. Monty Hawkins
Readers of the Coastal Fisherman will often note where a fish was caught in a picture's caption. Many times, places such as Russell's Reef, the African Queen Reef or the Bass Grounds Reef are being listed; not just for sea bass & tautog, but for flounder as well.
For flounder we have, in fact, witnessed marine fishery management's greatest success. Not just on our reefs, but on all artificial reefs in the Mid-Atlantic.
I've been fishing on party boats out of Ocean City since 1980. During my first 25 years, catching a summer flounder over a shipwreck, natural or artificial reef wasn't common. We were more likely to hear a passenger holler, "Net!" for a flatfish while drifting open bottom for sea trout (weakfish) in the fall.
As the flounder stock was rebuilt to greater & greater numbers, we began to see them more regularly, even frequently, on reefs & wrecks. In July of 2007, I was double-anchored over the highest section of a well-known shipwreck when we caught double-headers of flounder around the rail of my party boat, the “Morning Star”. We caught those flounder on high/low sea bass rigs baited with clam. That moment was when I finally got the message: We have a marine flounder fishery now!
Further up the coast, 'flounder' are called 'fluke.' This is because northern New Jersey & southern New England still had a viable winter-flounder fishery long after we'd lost ours in the 1960’s.
"Catching flounder? Really? Which kind?" A conversation like that wouldn't do.
Long called fluke in commercial circles, a trawler towing Georges Bank, far offshore of Cape Cod, might catch 7 or more species of flat-fish in a single tow. Yellowtail flounder, winter flounder & summer flounder are all valuable species. In the commercial fisheries they became yellowtail, blackback and fluke to avoid confusion.
I suppose I might have reasoned it sooner and might have anticipated flounder's resurgence given I'm forever making a case for restoring reef habitat. I might have seen it coming because I'm keenly aware of reef lost in the era of uncontrolled, stern-towed fisheries where big, square-mile patches of reef were destroyed in the heart of industrial fishing's rise.
Offshore of Ocean City, we had huge reefs that were once easily located and fished over without electronic aids, without even LORAN C let alone GPS. Those multi-square mile natural reefs were lost forever as stern-towed gears worked closer & closer to known hangs & obstructions. They were lost forever as sandstone bottoms were ground back into sand by impacts year after year, decade after decade.
The Magnuson Act passed in 1976 to keep trans-Atlantic voyaging trawlers, enormous foreign fishing factories, from decimating our fish, but unfortunately the seafloor habitat that had produced those fish for all time were now badly damaged. It was at about this time too when our region's world-famous estuarine hard-bottom, oyster bars, would soon be recognized as gravely overfished.
Seafloor & bayfloor hard-bottoms were lost and fisheries dependent on those reefs for spawning production soon collapsed as well.
On the water we see eruptions of reef-life whenever a calamity happens, such as when the ship “Bow Mariner”, a 570 foot chemical tanker that exploded in 2007 only 50 nautical miles southeast of Ocean City, or the “Marine Electric”, a 605 foot coal cargo ship that broke in two after assisting a commercial fishing boat in 25 foot seas in February 1983, killing 34. The wreck lays 31 nautical miles SSE OC MD. Years after these terrible disasters, we've seen reef-life erupt at these sites and on all our artificial reef placements as well.
Indeed, reef sites popped up where the horrors of war were visited upon the East Coast's fleet in 1941 and early 1942, and also at locations where many unnamed storms at sea took down industrial fishing boats that grounded their way through our natural seafloor habitat. Ships lost to torpedo and unforecasted storm create reef what only time can destroy.
Trawling & hydraulic clamming boats had destroyed all the habitat they could by them late 1970’s. By then wrecks and a few surviving robust rocky bottoms were all that was left. When newly discovered, fishing on virgin wrecks and rockpiles was wonderful.
LORAN C allowed repeat & pinpoint navigation to these far more compact reefs. Although smaller, wrecks can hold incredible populations of fish, owing to height, they're much more productive than low-profile natural reef. As natural habitat was being lost in grand scale, so too were smaller reefs, with unbelievable populations of reef-fish being found. Only after these reefs were discovered, and then fished down, did the sad truth of overfishing, the real devastation of entire reef-fish populations, come to be seen. Because sometimes huge landings of fish still occurred, an aura of "All Is Well" existed. As LORAN C became more affordable, and microprocessors relieved the need for charting courses, "All Is Well" soon gave way to, “What have we done?”.
Curiously, NOAA has consistently refused to consider our low-lying, nearshore reef ecologies in any sort of research. It wasn't until offshore wind-power was a consideration that any attention was given to bottom habitat at all. It remains that no action has been taken, especially in any manner of a fisheries restoration plan. Where even jet-skis are implicated and monitored for reef damage in the Caribbean, and a shipping company had better lawyer-up if there's a reef grounding on a tropical reef, along our Atlantic coast heavy commercial fishing gears, even towed from foreign ships, is considered to have no ecological concern and has never suffered any implication in the decline of fisheries production owing to the historical loss of habitat.
I've witnessed a few impacts myself where sandstone substrates grew over with soft-corals after nearly a decade of no trawl impact and became productive fishing spots again. Once trawled over, they again become only marginally better than a sandy bottom. I've even filmed trawling's aftermath; but events such as I've witnessed are very small scale compared to our marine region's habitat loss in a historical context. Trawling over rocky, nearshore reefs today is very rare. Although management certainly hasn't recognized or protected nearshore reef bottoms, the inshore trawl fishery is almost entirely conducted on sand shoals today and never, ever over artificial reefs.
By listening to old-timers who fished as far back as the 1930’s, even before Ocean City had an inlet, one can see habitat loss has played an important role in our fisheries' downward spiral. Yes, white marlin were almost never thrown back in that fishery's early years, but marlin didn't move from five miles offshore in the 1930’s and 1940’s to sixty miles offshore and more today because of declining numbers. No matter how numerous white marlin become in years to come, owing to catch regulation management aimed at restoration, only habitat restoration, especially from oyster filtration, can turn our now green inshore ocean waters to blue again. Only habitat restoration can restore white marlin to their full historic range.
But I digress. My point in writing this article is to illustrate how it wasn't just sea bass and tautog that lost reef habitat in the era of major habitat loss. You see, sea bass and tautog were never the reason our low-lying reefs were trawled at all. Our reefs were trawled for summer flounder.
Slowly but surely, the Ocean City Reef Foundation (OCRF) is building more and more habitat each year.
Owing to an incredible effort at managing flounder with catch-restrictions aimed at both commercial and recreational fishers, the species is coming back wonderfully. Although the natural hardbottom reef communities where flounder evolved are only found in a much smaller footprint off Ocean City today, the species is using the artificial reefs that have been created to feed, shelter & spawn during the time of year when they would have traditionally 'rocked-up.'
Finding these reef habitats is crucial to angling success. The Ocean City Reef Foundation sends sponsors hundreds of charts annually detailing exact GPS coordinates and anglers have found success from the very closest reef to the furthest offshore.
For sea bass and tautog it is often not enough to get close to a reef - you have to be on it. Exactly on it. Fortunately, with flounder there's a little wiggle room. Drifting near or alongside a reef can produce good fish.
Some anglers prefer traditional styles of flounder rigs with long leaders. Others like a fancy bucktail with a teaser above or below. Personally, I tie a rig right into my leader by making a long dropper loop and sliding all manner of bucktail skirts & beads on before finishing with a 4/0 or 50 wide gap hook. I'll position a 3 to 8 ounce sinker below all the jewelry to suit conditions. I should note, however, that sometimes the best flounder rig is one with no jewelry whatever..
Hook selection is vital to ensuring good releases. While some anglers are experts with circle hooks; not me. A "Kahle" or "wide gap" hook of suitable size, however, provides nearly perfect results so far as preventing deep-hooking injuries. In study after study, deeply hooked fish are least likely to survive release. Wide gap hooks mimic circle hooks in performance while J hooks are deep-hooking's main culprit.
The National Marine Fisheries Service calculates recreational fishers kill more flounder in release discards than what we take home to fry, so anything we do to improve release survival, and then have management incorporate that better survival into their mortality calculations, would result in higher quotas & better fishing for everyone.
Keep an ARC dehooker on hand, the kind with a curly-tail pigtail. Once you've learned how to use it you'll never leave another hook in a fish.
Knowing where & how to fish puts more fish on your table. Knowing how to release them and using the right hooks lets more fish grow to become jumbos.
The Ocean City Reef Foundation is a small non-profit with no payroll. You can help build reef off the coast by sponsoring the Ocean City Reef Foundation. Reef building can make fishing much, much better in the future.
Urge oyster restoration in the Chesapeake & Delaware Bays too. Turning now-green waters blue again relies on oyster restoration's success.
Whether naturally, by accident or on purpose, flounder, sea bass and tautog are all using whatever reef habitat they can find to feed, grow to maturity, shelter from predators and spawn.
Artificial reefs are vital to fisheries restoration, but once management has discovered how to maximize a species' spawning potential, it’s population can only be grown to the existing habitat. To take populations higher still will one day require we build more reef.
More coral, more fish.
Capt. Monty Hawkins is the owner/operator of the party boat, “Morning Star” that is docked at the Ocean City Fishing Center.
