READER STORY
David Curtis, from Bass Angling Conservation, explains why all sea anglers should be rejecting the government’s dead duck of a Bass Fisheries Management Plan
Have you ever had the frustrating experience of someone asking for your advice, you spending valuable time giving your advice and then that person ignores it and does something else? This is what Defra has done to sea anglers with the bass plan – asking sea anglers what they want to see in the bass fishery and then publishing a plan that doesn’t prioritise what we want.
But Defra has listened carefully to commercial fishers, promising them a review of the bass authorisation system that could let more commercial fishers into the bass fishery, suggesting ditching the “bycatch only” rule for netters and trawlers, allowing commercial fishers to land all the bass they catch and changing the system to enable commercial fishers to get their catch limits increased more quickly.
The biggest problem with Defra’s plan is its impoverished objective for our bass stock. What sea anglers want is simple: improve and protect the bass stock so we (and our children and our children’s children) have more and bigger bass to catch – fewer blanks, more trophy fish. We like catching large, powerful bass and these fish are vital to the stock too, since they are more reproductive than smaller bass.
Currently we have a bass stock structure where too many of the large bass have been removed by commercial fishing, so the stock lacks resilience, increasing the chance of another crash in the future
