Draft Amendment 15 (PDF here) to the 2006 Consolidated Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan is a dense, technical document with a short fuse that is seeking an alarming objective. This federal management action is proposing to modify or eliminate four areas that currently restrict or prohibit commercial longline fishing due to the indiscriminate nature of the gear and the excessive mortality it causes to non-target and juvenile species, as well as overfished target species.

The closed areas, known as Mid-Atlantic shark, Charleston Bump, East Florida Coast, and DeSoto Canyon, have been in place for decades. Not unexpectedly, the removal of hundreds of thousands of longline hooks has resulted in tangible recoveries of iconic sportfish populations in some areas. In one area, the East Florida Coast Pelagic Longline Closed Area, an unexpected benefit has been the establishment of the nation’s best sailfish fishery. The direct economic benefit to recreational fishing-related businesses in Florida from this catch-and-release fishery has been nothing short of remarkable. Even though this particular zone was created to be a conservation area for juvenile swordfish — and was never intended to be exposed again to commercial plunder — it has been the object of repeated attempts to reintroduce longlining.

The Push to Reintroduce Longlining

It’s an unfortunate reality that as an area recovers back to health, pressure mounts to reinstate the very commercial gear that drove the area into an overfished condition in the first place. Previous attempts to allow longlines back into closed areas have included ham-handed charades by longline operators pretending to be marine science entities and using the federal exempted fishing permit process to propose “research” with longlines.

In one case, the permit would have granted a single longline company exclusive access to drop longlines in a closed area for three years and sell all the legal fish it caught under the permit. In essence, it was pursuing an Exclusive Longlining Permit and it almost worked. In that instance, it took months of work and the combined effort of the marine conservation community to successfully oppose the permit and safeguard the East Florida Coast Pelagic Longline Closed Area.

Amendment 15 is a slightly different animal. NOAA Fisheries contends that closed areas do not provide critical fishery-dependent data, which includes data that are collected during normal fishing operations. The agency says this lack of fishery-dependent data complicates efforts to assess the effectiveness of the conservation zones and the model they have created to evaluate the zones requires the use of longlines. In other words, they can’t know how well the zones are working to protect targeted species from longlines unless longlines are reintroduced to see what protected species they kill.

To be fair, NOAA is asking the right questions:

• Are the conservation zones working?
• Are they in the right places?
• Are they achieving the management goals?
• Do the zones need to be modified or moved to be more effective?
• Are changes in ocean conditions altering migration patterns and distribution of marine species?

Those are valid scientific inquiries that should be made about any closed area.

Longline Fishing Has Little Support from Public

But while evaluating the effectiveness of the areas is one thing, the verdict on longlines came back a long time ago. It’s a dirty, indiscriminate gear. The thousands of baited hooks attached to miles of longline don’t know the difference between a swordfish and a sea turtle, or between an adult tuna and a juvenile billfish. Few things caught with it are viable to be released alive. When the gear was removed, an incredible, economically vibrant sailfish fishery appeared off the East Coast of Florida. If it is allowed back, it is only a matter of time before it overwhelms the resources that are subjected to it and valuable, sustainable recreational fisheries will disappear, too.

There is more focus than ever on the health of the oceans, and it is often difficult to reconcile this country’s rhetoric on marine conservation with NOAA’s continuing infatuation with indiscriminate commercial gear such as longlines and trawls. The goals of Amendment 15 may be valid, but the proposed means to attain them with longlines are flawed.

NOAA Fisheries will not get the support of the recreational angling community and the public at large for research efforts like this — no matter how practical — if the goal is to justify reintroducing dirty gear. Amendment 15 should take advantage of less destructive commercial gear like buoy gear and bandit rigs while evaluating the effectiveness of those conservation zones. Maintaining or improving that effectiveness should be the paramount goal, not finding a way to allow longlines back in to wreak havoc.

Proposals like Amendment 15 (submit your own comments here) are frustrating to the marine conservation community because they showcase over and over the agency’s never-ending embrace of the most indiscriminate, destructive gear in the ocean. There are better ways to research these conservation zones than using this horrendous gear. Amendment 15 may very well be a necessary evaluation of conservation zones, but NOAA’s insistence on reintroducing longlines — even in a supposed research capacity — makes this proposal as suspect as an Exclusive Longlining Permit.

About the Author: Ted Venker is the Vice President and Conservation Director of the Coastal Conservation Association.

The post Are Longlines Headed Back to Protected Waters? appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

Bigger is better when it comes to landing nets—until it’s time to store one within the confines of a skiff or small bay boat, which rarely includes stowage for beach-ball-size hoops. Enter these collapsible models, which feature a compact storage size but unfurl to end big battles.

Bass Pro Shops Gold Series Folding Landing Net, $40

Like an umbrella, this clever landing net packs tightly around the handle to let it slide into the tightest spaces. Yet the 26-by-25-inch landing net deploys with a fast, one-handed operation, and the handle telescopes from 35 to 62 inches to spare anglers’ backs. Bonus: The net is easily replaced.

Stowmaster Saltwater Series Landing Net, $230

Collapsible yet strong, this model pairs aircraft-grade extruded aluminum with rubber-dipped, knotless nylon netting (24-by-28 inches) that preserves fishes’ delicate slime layer and helps them survive the fight. That netting also resists tangles, and the hoop collapses to half its size. The handle extends like a go-go-gadget arm to 84 inches, and a lifetime warranty makes good on (unlikely) damage.

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When anglers anywhere want to catch live bait, they commonly use a gold-hook rig or throw a cast net. But there’s a third option, one that originated among South Florida captains targeting ballyhoo: a hoop net.

All three methods carry pros and cons. Catching bait on a gold-hook or sabiki rig, which typically consists of six dressed hooks, can be quite effective, but the process can be painstakingly slow, especially when you’re catching only one baitfish at a time.

Cast nets catch bulk numbers in a single throw, but they can be difficult to fully open, and they can damage baits, removing scales and gilling the fish in the mesh.

Hoop nets catch fair amounts of bait and, when used properly, they don’t gill or scale bait. On the negative side: They can be difficult to store, given the size of their circular hoop. However, recent advances in hoop-net design have resolved that and are leading to increased popularity.

How Hoops Work
Different types of hoop nets have been used for years to catch everything from bait and food fish to lobsters and crabs. Commercial anglers use long, ­conical nets deployed in the water so fish swim into them. A crab hoop net is baited to attract the crustaceans; when a crab goes in to eat, the fishermen lift the net from the water.

Most hoop nets for catching bait — traditionally homemade or custom-made — include a solid, 4-foot-diameter fiberglass hoop with a 4- or 5-foot-deep mesh net and an attached line. The standard mesh size would be ¼-inch square, or ½-inch stretched, which makes the net less likely to gill the baits.

The captain chums up bait near the boat, and then places the net in the water, drifting it back behind and beneath the fish. He then pulls the hoop to the boat, capturing the fish.

Capt. Bunky Leach of Homestead, Florida, has long used hoop nets to catch ballyhoo, speedos, cigar minnows and other baitfish for charter trips on his boat Reef Reelief out of Ocean Reef Club in north Key Largo. Storing the net on the 37-foot sport-fisherman is not a problem

“I have plenty of room,” Leach says. “On a center-console, that could become an issue. When I had a center-console, I used to stick it on top of the T-top and bungee it down.”

Capt. Tony DiGiulian (saltwater​proconsulting.com) of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, says that while storage can be a challenge, a hoop net can often make the difference between having dozens of live baitfish or just a handful.

“Hoop nets are great for cigar minnows, speedos, threadfin herring, pilchards, anything that can be spooky,” DiGiulian says. “When we’re trying to catch those baits, we see them, we mark them, and they come up in the chum, but they can be very ­reluctant to eat our sabiki rigs.

“A lot of times, when ballyhoo, ­pilchards and other bait are on top, when you start to throw your cast net, they can see it coming, and they’ll scatter or dive right before it hits the water. You can’t catch as many at one time in a hoop net, but when bait is really sketchy and scared, it’s a good way to go.”

The Ballyhoop
Always a big fan of hoop nets, Yunior Dominguez of Hialeah, Florida, saw room for improving their design. In 2015, Dominguez, the owner of Piros Bait & Tackle, built a net with a one-piece stainless-steel hoop, which he said worked better than his fiberglass one because of its thinner diameter.

The ¼-inch steel could be retrieved through the water much faster than the ½-inch fiberglass. The steel hoop also held up better, and its silver color didn’t spook baitfish like the yellow fiberglass did. But the new version was still difficult to store.

Two years later, he designed a net with a collapsible two-piece aluminum hoop with male and female connections that stores in a half-moon-shape case and fits in most consoles or large hatches. He introduced the Ballyhoop (theballyhoop.com) at the 2017 ICAST fishing-tackle trade show in Orlando, Florida.

“It was a total success,” Dominguez says, “but I still kept getting people saying it was too big for their small boat.”

So he invented another version — all of his designs are patented — with a two-piece clear-polycarbonate hoop that stores like a two-piece fly rod. It can be placed upright in a rod holder or in a rod rack under a gunwale as well as in a console. Plus, because it’s clear, Dominguez says it doesn’t spook baitfish at all. And because it’s lightweight, any angler can use it easily and efficiently.

He adds that he has sold Ballyhoops — which retail online and at tackle stores for $200 (aluminum) and $300 (polycarbonate) — from Florida to Australia to Dubai, plus Costa Rica and Mexico. However, he hasn’t sold any in California, where he says hoop nets sometimes are used to catch Pacific mackerel baits. So far, he has no dealers in the state.

Hoop-Netting Tips
Dominguez says anglers should use finely ground chum to attract bait as opposed to chunks, which can get caught in the net’s mesh, causing baitfish to feed on it from behind the net. He uses Tournament Master Blue Label Chum, which is double ground.

“You have to control your chum. If you chum too much, the bait’s going to go all over the place and be hard to net,” adds Dominguez, who says to wait until the bait is eating the chum before putting the hoop net in the water. “Once they’re in that feeding frenzy mode, they don’t care. If you put the net in first, it could spook them.”

Leach, who uses a fiberglass hoop net, adjusts the position of the chum bag on his boat, moving it toward the bow if necessary to bring baitfish closer to the boat. If there’s too much current, he’ll attach a 1- to 5-ounce lead sinker to the bottom of the net with a clip so it sinks and keeps the net open.

“If you don’t have a weight on the net, a lot of times it wants to blow back on the hoop,” he explains, adding that he sometimes ties an overhand knot in the mesh to shorten the net. “That way we don’t put the bait all the way in the back of the net. The quicker you can put them in the livewell, the less scale damage you’ll have and the better they are. They just last a lot longer.

“When we’re fishing offshore for big game or even if we’re on the reef, we like to have good, healthy baits. Typically all the baits we have in the livewell at the end of the day we put in a bait tray and salt them up for the next day.”

If the current is light or non­existent, a hoop net can sink too deeply. Dominguez, who has numerous bait-catching videos on the Ballyhoop Instagram page, attaches a half-filled clear-plastic water bottle with a rubber band to the hoop. “The bottle is buoyant enough so the net stays under the ­surface, but not way down,” he says.

The more you play with a hoop net, the more likely you’ll leave the sabikis and cast nets untouched.

“If you can get a hoop net to work, you’re going to do pretty well,” Leach says. “We went out for 30 minutes and caught 400 baits for a tournament.”

The post Pros Tips on Using Hoop Nets to Capture Ballyhoo, Live Bait appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.

Sometimes you want to add an extra grip on a net or gaff. One of the easiest ways is to create a cord wrap. Mariners have been adding wraps for centuries. Modern cordage such as 550 nylon paracord (about $6.50 for 25 feet) results in smooth, ­comfortable grips. It comes in a rainbow of colors. You can use the cobra weave, corncob braid, ringbolt or west country whip. But one of the easiest is the French hitch. You’ll find a number of video tutorials online that will take you through the steps. As with most cord wraps, the hardest part is starting it; then it’s a matter of repeating the pattern until you reach the length of the grip you want.

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New Frabill Trophy Haul Nets

Frabill debuted a new series of landing nets at ICAST 2018. The Trophy Haul series includes eight new models. The Power Extend 2124 pictured here include a handle that extends to 72 inches, a reflective hoop, a three-way LED light for night fishing, and a Trophy Haul grip at the yoke for landing monster fish.

Calcutta Add New Grips

Calcutta has added colorful and comfortable new grips to its extensive line fishing tools. Introduced at the 2018 ICAST show fishing-industry show in Orlando, Florida, the stylish handles are available on Calcutta’s crimpers, pliers and diagonal cutters.

Cuda Fishing Tools New Professional Snip and Plier

Cuda Fishing Tools announced two new products to its Professional series at the ICAST fishing-industry show in Orlando, Florida — the Professional Snip and the Professional Plier. Both feature top-of-the-line materials and craftsmanship. The eight-inch Professional Snip features German 4116 stainless steel blades with titanium non-stick. The micro serrated edges quickly cut wire, braid, mono and fluoro. The eight-innch Professional Plier has titanium allow jaws and integrated cutter for braid, mono and wire. Both tools have multi-layer, two-tone, cold-molded Micarta full-tang grips.

New Telescoping Bait Nets from Promar

Promar introduced a new line of bait nets at the 2018 ICAST Show. The aluminum telescoping bait-well nets offer handles that extend to 38 inches in length, but also retract to 18 inches in length. A twist-lock knob secures the handle at any length in between. The nets also feature soft, woven nylon mesh netting for cradling fragile baits. The anodized aluminum handle and hoop resist corrosion in saltwater use. The nets are ideal for boats with both transom and below-deck livewells, allowing you to shorten the handle for the transom well, but extend it for the deck well.

New Gerber Fishing Fishing Tools

Gerber launched a series of 12 fishing tools at the 2018 ICAST fishing-industry show. The collection includes the 7.5-inch, hot-pforged Magnipliers. These have an ergonomic trigger grip and thumb lock, as well as replaceable jaw tips and carbide cutter. The pliers include a sheath and lanyard. Other tools in the new Gerber series include line-management multitool (with crimper, hook threader and snips), take-apart shears, fillet knives, nipper and braid cutters.

New Pelagic Fishing Tools

Pelagic, best known for stylish angling life-style apparel, swimwear and sunglasses, debuted a line of fishing tools at the 2018 ICAST show in Orlando, Florida. A sneak peek at the tools revealed two pair of pliers, lip-gripper and a lip-gripper/scale. All of the tools displayed top-quality, corrosion-resistant construction. In a distinctive Pelagic touch, each tool sported a finish with pattern reminiscent of a dorado.

Premio Titanium Fishing Pliers

The new Premio titanium pliers are made of 100 percent machined titanium, given a comfortable matte finish and fitted with our Premeio’s Super Halo hinge and cobalt titanium cutters. Starting at only 3.9 ounces in weight, the pliers are available in 5.5-, 6.5- and 7.5-inch sizes. Each includes a holster made from the highest grade leather, with elastic cord lanyard and 304 stainless steel D-ring. All of the titanium pliers carry a full Lifetime Warranty.

The post ICAST 2018: New Fishing Tools and Accessories appeared first on Sport Fishing Mag.