The state of New Jersey keeps trying to pass a bill that would require registration for salt water fishing. The reason for this is so residents of the state won’t have to pay a national fee for a license.
Sometimes I just yearn for the good ole days, when all a kid needed was a fishing pole and some bait. A mother and her son used to stay at our rooming house once a year, and, using just hand lines, caught their fair share of fish.
I did a lot of fishing during my fish cleaning days, meaning before I became a teen. We fished while waiting for the party boats to come in, and caught massive amounts of fish. Many were too small to keep, and we also caught more than our fair share of eels and oyster crackers, which we threw back.
A pint of surf clams back then cost thirty cents, and if we didn’t quite have enough money to buy them, we bought individual clams at the back door of a restaurant for a nickel apiece.
A lot of people fished back then, both from piers, the ends of streets, and from party boats, which were usually crammed to capacity. The only people making money from fishermen were party boats and bait and tackle shops. No one else had their hands out, saying, “Give us some, too!”
The regulators fear overfishing, which is why they think it’s important to register and to pay a fee. The problem is that it’s not the average angler depleting fish populations, it’s the big commercial boats. People demand seafood, and they mostly want to get it from either the supermarket or in restaurants.
It’s way too confusing these days to bother with fishing, at least for me. Each year you need a new chart explaining the sizes of each type of fish, how many you’re allowed to keep, the dates of the open season, and how to measure the fish or shellfish (it’s not always the same for all fish). The chart also explains where you’re allowed to fish for some species, such as the striped bass.
For 2010, the winter flounder season ends on May 21, and the summer flounder season starts on May 23. The recreational fishing person is allowed two winter flounder at twelve inches, and six winter flounder at eighteen inches. You see, I wouldn’t know a winter flounder from a summer flounder even if one was wearing sunglasses and flip-flops and the other was sporting a ski mask. I assume that pretty much the same bait is used for each, but maybe the winter flounder prefer their clam dipped in a cup of hot cocoa. No, don’t write me and tell me that shiners are the best bait for flounder. I’ve caught a bunch of them that way back in the day, although my uncle preferred shedder crab. I don’t know what that has to do with anything, though.
I can’t even identify half the fish they’re catching these days, so it’s a good thing I gave up cleaning them over fifty years ago. The party boats used to bring in a lot of porgy and bass (no, it’s not an opera), as well as spots (Cape May goodies), and ling cod. Now, croakers seem to be all the rage. We were fishing a few years ago in Delaware Bay and kept catching those things. They’re something like miniature drumfish, I guess, because they make a similar noise.
I just might fish some this year, if I can untangle the regulations. Maybe I need to take a laptop with me so I can figure out which ones I can keep. That 30-cent pint of clams is now up around five dollars, and that would be about right, except it’s considerably less than a pint these days. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was a chance of catching something I could legally keep. Anyway, I don’t have to worry about fishing for awhile now, because the woodchuck has made his prediction and we’ll have six more weeks of winter.
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