The king mackerel fishing was hot but suddenly it was interrupted—halted by federal fisheries authorities on the basis of data that can only be described as a joke.

But no one was laughing.

A lot of money was lost. A lot of fam­ily fishing fun was wiped out.

Charter captains and other anglers off Miami, the Keys and West Florida were shut down from kingfishing on Jan. 13 when federal officials decided that a recreational quota was reached for the “Gulf Stock” of king mackerel.

And now the bombshell:

It turns out that the catch estimate that played a lead role in the shutdown included 124,802 kings caught from shore. Shore? Kingfish by the thousands and thousands from shore?

Have Florida Sportsman and all the other outdoor media, along with the newspapers and TV, missed covering all this great fishing from piers and beaches?

No. Fact is, the 124,802 shore-catch is the latest and most flagrant example of the wildly inaccurate data that the Na­tional Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and federal fishery management coun­cils use to regulate our fishing.

Worse yet, the same data is used rou­tinely by Florida authorities for state-level deliberations and drafting laws that affect all fishermen.

Many government biologists will tell you privately that much of the data is weak at best and is subject to huge er­ror factors. But at the same time, they’ll argue that since the data is all there is, it must be utilized as if it were gospel.

“It’s just plain stupid,” said one ob­server, “to take bogus statistics and use them because they’re there. That’s like looking at the wrong answers in an arithmetic class and accepting them anyway because they’re the ‘best an­swers available’.”

So, where did the obviously inflated shore-catch of kings come from?

The numbers are part of NMFS’ Ma­rine Recreational Fisheries Survey. It’s based on random telephone calls to the general public and in-person “inter­cept” interviews. Because of limited funding, often-inexperienced personnel and small samplings, the statistics have long been suspect.

Suspicions seem to be confirmed, in spades, as exemplified by the king­fish data.

How exactly did the 124,802 shore-catch total come about? We asked scientists in Miami, St. Petersburg, Talla­hassee and Washington to please run through the raw material that produced this estimate—an estimate that resulted in a damaging shut-down that still has the recreational fishing industry reeling.

At presstime, we still were waiting for an explanation. We’ll try again for the May issue.

Any reasonable explanation would be mighty tough to come up with because Florida’s veteran sportfishing populace knows that few kings are taken from shore.

Dave Sork, for instance, has not seen or heard of a king mackerel being caught on the city pier at Anna Maria in the eight years he’s been managing the facility. He did hear of a king caught in 1981.

Said Dennis Hart, second-generation owner of Hart’s Landing in Sarasota: “I can’t ever remember a king mackerel being caught from shore anywhere along Florida’s West-Central Coast.”

The 124,802 kings supposedly caught from shore apparently stem from some kind of extrapolation based on isolated spots such as a handful of piers in the Panhandle. Phil Halstead, who fishes the Okaloosa Island Pier in Panama City and follows the action at two other piers in Pensacola and Panama City, says the three piers together could con­ceivably account for 5,000 kings in a good year. “But I don’t know of any other place in the Florida Gulf Region that produces kingfish from shore. If you ask me, the 124,000 number is outrageous.”