surfcaster's journal issue 8

However, things began to change in late 2006, when the latest reauthorization of the MagnusonStevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act passed both houses of Congress. That law required that a comprehensive registration of salt water anglers be adopted by 2009 (later moved back to 2010 by the National Marine Fisheries Service), although it prohibited the federal government from charging for any such registration prior to 2011.

Due to states’ rights considerations, only anglers who fished in federal waters, or for anadromous species (such as striped bass) needed to be registered with the federal government, and even they could avoid the licensing requirement if they held a state salt water license which met federal standards.

Since the primary purpose of the federal registration requirement was data collection, the federal standards for state licenses were pretty straightforward. Such licenses must cover the great majority of anglers in the state (children under 16 and, at least in the beginning, adults older than 65 are two primary exceptions, as are anglers who fish exclusively from for-hire vessels, who are subject to a different federal data collection process), and they had to include adequate contact information, so that data collection agents for the Marine Recreational Information Program, the hopefully improved successor to the much-criticized and badly flawed Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistical Survey, could easily contact salt water anglers and calculate the best estimates possible of recreational harvest and fishing activity. There is no federal requirement that a state charge anything for its licensing program, an omission that opened the door to significant controversy a little later on.

However, even the coverage requirement of the federal law was a cause for significant debate.

Many states which had already adopted licenses also created broad exceptions to their licensing requirements. In Florida, for example, residents who fished solely from shore did not need to be licensed, while in Virginia, and a number of other states, the owner of a fishing boat could purchase a “boat license” which covered everyone fishing from that vessel, so that they didn’t need individual licenses. Not unexpectedly, anglers who had previously been exempt from their states’ licensing requirements were often very unhappy to learn that, in order to gain federal approval, their states