If you fish for flounder between Little River and Rudee Inlets, you probably already know the news. North Carolina will not hold a recreational season for flounder in 2024. This news comes as the lowest of low blows to the inshore fishing community, who have seen three consecutive shortened flounder seasons, along with greatly diminished limits, following the most recent stock assessment for North Carolina’s southern flounder, which was published in 2019.
Tar Heel anglers have been determined to have overfished their quota in 2023, so by law, 2024 has no quota to go out and catch. Per the results of the stock assessment, southern flounder in NC has been overfished, and was still experiencing overfishing, a combined result of commercial and recreational reported landings. The stock must be rebuilt to an acceptable level by 2029.
Anyway, that’s what the stock assessment, the framework for rebuilding stocks, and the “best available science” tells us. So that’s where things are this season.
The blame game
To say anglers are outraged is an understatement. Fingers have been pointed in both directions ever since this news went public. Petitions have been signed and protests have been organized.
Distrust between recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, and North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries may be at an all-time high. I don’t fault any side of the argument.
NCDMF has a job to do. They are charged with keeping our fish stocks viable, and they have a specific framework to work within.
The commercial sector must make a living, and they deal with tightened restrictions each year I can remember.
Not only do recreational fishermen want to go fishing, but they also make a more-than-valid argument about tourism dollars lost in the coastal region of NC, which only really thrives when we have visitors, many of which come to fish.
So, I get it, from a lot of different angles. We are dealing with a shared resource, which everyone should have at least some degree of access to. Everyone wants a bigger slice of the pie, and the pie (we are told) keeps getting smaller. Once again, an easy solution doesn’t exist.
In the short term, I don’t believe that we will get any recreational access to flounder fishing in North Carolina in 2024. To get a season, fisheries law would have to be changed, and call me crazy, but I don’t see that happening, even with enough well-intentioned people making noise about it. We simply don’t have enough time, and government (at any level) rarely moves faster than a snail’s pace.
Looking ahead
But what about the long term? I don’t want flounder seasons for the rest of my life to be confined to a few days in September, and I don’t want to be restricted to a single fish. Most inshore charter captains don’t want that, and it’s hard to convince someone towing their boat from the middle of the state to fish under those restrictions, that the ends justify the means.
I want to return to something that at least resembles the good old days of flounder fishing, be it just offshore at Yaupon Reef, in Snow’s Cut, or in the Pamlico. How do we get there? The more I think about it, my mind keeps coming to a solution that is potentially really, really viable. We could stock flounder.
Stock it up
Texas started a flounder stocking program in 2006. So far, the high-water mark of this program was 2022, when they successfully introduced almost 300,000 juvenile southern flounder into the wild across the state. That would obviously help biomass numbers anywhere.
South Carolina started their program, which is still in its infancy, in 2019, sending staff to Texas to see exactly how it is done. It isn’t like stocking saltwater fish is a new concept. SCDNR first began stocking red drum fingerlings in the 1980s, and the program is still in existence today. Fin clips and tagging of stocked fish have shown that it does indeed produce healthy, viable, adult fish that are capable of spawning and further bolstering the population, not to mention, the prospects of catching one when you’re fishing in South Carolina. It makes you wonder how many of those stocked redfish swam past Little River and became either part of the NC population or got caught. Either way, it appears to be working.
Stocking flounder isn’t nearly as cut and dried as stocking redfish. Water temperature plays a huge role in whether eggs even hatch, and (assuming they do) what sex the fingerling flounder turn out to be. Ideally, a hatch produces as many female flounder as possible. You need big females to get more eggs and thus, continue the cycle.
It’s not easy
Texas has encountered some good and some bad years with their program. Either way, it’s adding biomass to a state’s fishery which was in decline. The argument against stocking in other fisheries comes when stocking adds a non-native fish, or a different genetic strain into a wild population. This isn’t the case here. The original brood stock is coming from the same waters that the stockers are going back into. These are genetically the same fish, they are just spending the first couple of stages of their life in a tank, without the threat of predators, instead of an estuary.
Is an approach like this an example of humans “playing God?” I don’t believe it is. Fisheries need to be managed at some level. This is why we have limits, quotas, seasons, licenses, and reporting.
Southern flounder have been in demand since someone figured out how good they taste, many years ago. They have been targeted by commercial and recreational fishermen alike, perhaps well more than their population can reasonably stand. They have also dealt with dredging projects and with degrading water quality in many areas, and loss of habitat due to development right to the water’s edge in many places.
These fish need a helping hand, and if they get it, we may be able to begin catching them again sooner than current projections call for. Texas is already stocking them. South Carolina is learning how to stock based on how the Texas program does it. Research programs at UNCW and NC State University have been studying flounder for years. We know a great deal about these fish. We can collaborate and potentially help them and help ourselves in the process. North Carolina, it’s time to get on board with our neighbor to the south.
Helping hand:
Stocking is one method humans can use to help the southern flounder population, and it’s not a new concept. However, flounder are more difficult, but not impossible, to raise and stock, than most other fish.
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