As sportfisherman quietly forfeit red grouper bag limits, bottom lonline boats, like this one loading up on bait in Madeira Beach, are poised to gain a greater proportion of the fishery.

The system that manages grouper landings in the Gulf of Mexico favors commercial industry over private citizens. It has invited overcapitalization to the point where market fishermen have financed bigger boats and a type of gear that’s now the global pariah of fisheries: the longline. Stealthy, deadly, undiscerning.

Meanwhile, recreational anglers are on the verge of being regulated out of the fishery.

When you scan the 367-page federal plan for red grouper in the Gulf of Mexico, you get the feeling that maybe things are all right. Through acronyms and alternatives and bio-oceano-socioeconomic reports, biologists and statisticians tell us they are confident 10 years of deprivation will atone for untold decades of overfishing. A diet plan for fisheries, basically. After that, things will be hunky dory.

There’s the temptation to sit back and relax. After all, the plan comes from a $700 million federal juggernaut: the National Fisheries Management Service (NMFS). Before 1976, when Congress passed the landmark Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act (at the time absent Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens) the U.S. did very little to manage saltwater fisheries. Yet there were boats fishing red grouper well before that time, back as far as the 1850s, when Cuban handliners sailed into the area. In the mid 1950s, records show fishers were taking 16 million pounds of red grouper per year—more than double current levels.

Try as we may, it’s probable that no one will ever get a fix on what a healthy grouper stock looks like. The feds offer sustainable catch rates, year-to-year, and biological indices such as gonad weight and the ratio of males to females in the fishery.

One old-time grouper fisherman I spoke with, Walt Worthington, retired in Carrabelle, actually left commercial grouper fishing to work Gulf oil fields in 1978. At the time, he noticed production on the longline boats was falling off, as was the average size of the fish.

Of the remaining grouper in the Gulf, federal allocation among “user groups” is clumsy. Using snapshot data from 1999 to 2001, NMFS divied up 81 percent of the red grouper to commercial fishers, and 19 percent to recreational fishers.

The Magnuson Act—the voice of Congress—stipulates that allocations must be “fair and equitable to all fishermen...and carried out in such a manner that no particular individual, corporation or other entity acquires an excessive share of such privileges.”

A bigger picture, from 1990 to 2000, showed a ratio of 75 percent commercial to 25 percent recreational.

Somewhere between 1990—when NMFS approved the first-ever Gulf Reef Fish Management Plan—and today, the feds, one, whittled away at historical recreational participation in the fishery; and two, locked in the assumption that the current scheme is best from an economic standpoint.

Where’d those fish go? An “entity”—namely the commercial grouper fleet—has unquestionably acquired an excess share of privileges.

Coastal Conservation Association Florida is likely to commission an independent review of the economics of recreational grouper fishing. A similar study, completed last year, revealed startling benefits of recreational striped bass fishing along the northeastern U.S. coast—to the tune of $6.63 billion, versus $250 million for commercial catches, when transactions down the line are considered.

That NMFS has not fully accounted for the value of sportfishing is lamentable; we’re left with an allocation which, as of November 2005, had wrenched the recreational red grouper bag to one fish, with season closures looming. That’s down from five fish, year-round, as recently as two years ago.

Fortunately, a court has now ruled that NMFS’ interim rule closing all-grouper recreational takes for November and December is “arbitrary and capricious” and could apply only to red grouper rather than include gags, which are one of the top targets for sportsmen in these two months.

That still leaves unsettled what will be the regulations in a permanent rule to be hammered out by federal authorities in months ahead.

And then there’s the gear.

The bottom longline is used by 138 U.S.-flagged vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, most based out of west central Florida.

It is far and away the most devastating tool of the commercial fleet, accounting for 3.5 million pounds of red grouper in 2003. That’s more than half of the grouper allocation (6.56 million pounds) for the entire commercial and recreational fleet combined. (Remember the 2004 allocation for the entire recreational fleet—countless hundreds of boats—was 1.25 million pounds.) Fish traps—set to be prohibited in 2007, for reasons of bycatch and loss—and vertical, hook-and-line gear are also used in the commercial fishery.

In 2002, responding to an apparent unfolding crisis in red grouper, the Gulf Council stood poised to prohibit longlines inside 50 fathoms—essentially removing the gear from the fishery.

Such a move, applauded by this magazine and many conservation groups, had precedent: In 1990, the Council prohibited longlines in less than 20 fathoms along the Gulf Coast of Florida to Cape San Blas, and shallower than 50 fathoms west of that point, “so as not to allow the gear to become established in the red snapper fishery,” said Steve Atran of the Council.