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Changes to catch limits are proposed for fishers inside the Fiordland Marine Area marine reserves and habitat lines.
Fisheries New Zealand is seeking public feedback on changes to recreational and commercial fishing in the Fiordland Marine Area (FMA), that include reducing catch limits by up to 66%.
The changes have been proposed with the help of the Fiordland Marine Guardians (FMG) and include a recreational vessel limit of four times the daily species and combined bag limit.
Fiordland Marine Guardians chair Dr Rebecca McLeod said “this means that each species has its own limit that recreational fishers can take per day, so they differ on what species it is, and then a combined bag of, say, finfish.
“You may be able to catch 10 finfish, and of those, you can take a maximum of the daily limit of each individual species within that bag.”
She said that the combined finfish bag limit of 30 per person was proposed to be reduced to 20 for fishers in the open coast and 10 if they were inside the Fishing Line.
Each species had a different allocation to it.
“We’re trying to encourage people to fish out where the fishery is most productive and can handle fishing pressure,” she said.
FMG had also proposed the reporting of people’s catch from recreational fishing as a mandatory requirement, but McLeod said the Government was not willing to make it mandatory.
“But they have said that this is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that reporting of catch can be useful, so we’re encouraging the community to download this new fishing app … called Mainland Catch, and they can report the catch that they make in the area,” she said.
Other changes included a “prohibition of a selection of bulk harvesting methods including cod potting, longlines, and setlines for recreational and commercial fishers landward of the fishing lines (fiord headlands).”
These changes applied to both recreational and commercial fishers and aimed to “remove the bulk harvesting methods inside the fiord entrances,” McLeod said.
Recreational rock lobster regulations would remain the same.
Meet some of the people and follow the journey behind getting restaurant quality fish from sea to your local supermarket. (First published February 2022)
Why are the changes being proposed?
The changes came on the back of members of the public raising concerns about the state of fisheries to the Fiordland Marine Guardians.
“We then started a review and it has taken us three years to conduct that review, and consult with the community, and get to this point where we made our recommendations to the minister, and they have been accepted,” McLeod said.
The group stated that the new changes would “lower the risk of localised depletion, for now” but the group remained concerned about the impact of larger fishing vehicles on fisheries’ sustainability.
It added that large vessels carrying more passengers could increase fishing pressure and contribute to the risk of localised depletion of fish stocks.
It said that while it wasn’t concerned about the sustainability of rock lobster in the marine area, it was concerned about the sustainability of finfish including blue cod and groper/bass.
The Fiordland Marine Guardians partnered with the Ministry for the Environment, Department of Conservation, Ministry for Primary Industries, and Environment Southland (ES).
The group provided advice to ministers, government departments and ES on managing the FMA.
The group was “committed to reviewing the effectiveness of these changes in five years’ time” but was challenged by a lack of fisheries monitoring science.
The current proposed changes were a follow-up to the public consultation held by Fisheries NZ in August 2022.
At the time, the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries approved changes that included changing finfish and shellfish daily species and bag limits and moving the line that demarcated daily finfish and shellfish species limits.
Submissions would close on August 28 and could be emailed to FMsubmissions@mpi.govt.nz.
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