Mike Schoonveld: Would selling fish be a problem or a solution for Michigan?

I was at an after-dinner gathering of fishermen hailing from several states recently. It was what many would call a “bull session” where fishing tales, opinions, jokes, and other more or less important discussions flowed freely.

One of the participants, a resident of New York, said something about selling a bucket of perch. It wasn’t the point of his story, just a sidebar, but it caught my attention.

“Back up,” I said. “You sold a bucket of perch… perch you’d caught yourself? Is that legal?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s always been legal as far as I know. When I was a kid my dad would take me fishing and we’d catch our limits of perch, separate enough out for a few family dinners and then stop by a restaurant on the way home with the rest of the fish in a five-gallon bucket. The owner would weigh the bucket of fish, dump out the fish, weigh the empty bucket then do the math to figure the exact weight of the fresh perch. He paid dad $3 or $4 a pound.”

There was a bit more to the story, but the important thing was it was a legal transaction.

Preposterous!

Or was it? A couple of years ago I wrote a column for Michigan Outdoor News pondering the idea that the DNR could legalize selling fish caught by recreational anglers as an alternative to expanding commercial fishing opportunities here in Michigan.

At the time, there was a bill in the legislature, presented on behalf of Michigan’s commercial fishing industry, which would allow the currently licensed commercial fish-catching companies (not new ones) to expand their operations and allow them to net additional species of fish including walleye, lake trout and others.

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Currently, about 90% of Michigan’s legal commercial harvest is whitefish, just a bit over 3% are channel catfish and the rest of their catch is a smattering of white bass, burbot, and a few other species.

My “wild idea” was meant to be an illogical measure that would allow anyone in Michigan access to the same panfish and gamefish that licensed anglers are allowed to catch and eat. It would empower the thousands of licensed recreational anglers across the state who fund the lion’s share of the DNR’s Fisheries Division and pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Michigan’s economy annually.

Expanding commercial fishing would only enrich and perpetuate the small number of commercial operations that contribute a miniscule portion of the Fisheries Division’s budget and provide relatively little impact to Michigan’s total economy.

I clicked up N.Y.’s Freshwater Fishing Regulations Guide to see if my friend’s story was correct. It was and it still is, with certain guidelines. Not all species of fish can be sold and the most general guideline is that “saleable fish” are those species for which there is no closed season and no minimum length requirement.

I checked elsewhere in the regulations book and found this restriction eliminates selling crappies since though season for them is open all year, they have a 10-inch size limit. It eliminates selling brown trout caught in streams since the season is closed part of the year even though there’s no minimum length.

Bluegill and other sunfish are saleable, perch are saleable as are a number of species just listed as “other species” like white bass and freshwater drum. Most popular species like walleyes, salmon, largemouth and smallmouth bass, are not saleable, but there is even an exception to this.

If a recreational angler possesses a walleye, salmon, pike or other non-saleable species that was legally caught and transported into New York from another state, those fish are legal to sell in New York. Now there’s a loophole that has to drive a conservation officer nuts!

I followed-up by contacting the N.Y. Department of Environmental Conservation about these regulations. Lori Severino, spokesperson for NYDEC, couldn’t tell me how long these regs had been on the books, but she did say, “There are very few anglers selling a portion or all of their catch in New York State.”

Other points Severino highlighted for me include:

• Licensed (recreational) anglers fishing for species with daily catch limits must still abide by the catch limits.

• There are no restrictions on who can purchase the fish – they can be sold to individuals, restaurants or retail stores.

• There are no requirements as to whether the fish are sold, whole, partially cleaned or filleted.

In lakes Michigan and Huron a combination of environmental changes (mostly brought on by invasive quagga and zebra mussels) and highly efficient commercial harvest methods has negatively impacted the whitefish population where commercial fishing is permitted.

Would it be better (from a conservation or economic standpoint) to expand the commercial industry’s access to new species or additional territories or to allow recreational anglers sell a portion of their catch?

Ask that question of the friends you are with the next time you find yourself in an after-dinner bull-session.