If you want to catch a keeper flounder in Maryland, your odds range from fair to pretty good if you fish off of Ocean City or in its back bays. Venture into Virginia or Delaware waters and depending on the location and time of year, your odds go up slightly, especially for a trophy flattie. But what if you want to catch one in Maryland’s part of the Chesapeake? Not so much.
These days, especially the last two summers, reports of sport fishermen landing a keeper flounder north of the Patuxent River are about as rare as a moment of humility from The Donald. Well, perhaps not that few and far between, but the flounder catch has dropped off considerably in Maryland’s Bay. Even in Tangier Sound and around Point Lookout—two areas that historically have held fairly reliable seasonal numbers of fluke—the lack of flounder has people scratching their heads, wondering, “Where’d they go?”
And I don’t mean just a lot fewer keeper flounder are being caught; I mean fewer undersized ones, too. I began wondering why this may be, so I asked around. I asked several good flounder anglers and a couple of tackle shop owners their take. While all offered reasoned views—offshore commercial harvest, not enough prey, not enough big breeders—there wasn’t one definitive reason as to what has caused this dearth in flatfish. Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) survey of commercial pound nets in the Bay also points to a decline of summer flounder (legal and sub-legal), as have commercial landings in the Chesapeake, says DNR fisheries biologist Harry Rickabaugh.
Perhaps the Chesapeake decline in flounder is related to not enough suitable habitat and prey available? Not likely. I learned that no one really knows, but the working theory—no big surprise here—is the overall stock abundance isn’t strong enough to support even a decent fishery in the mid to upper Bay. Not that there ever was a great one, but at least we had a shot.
Which takes us to this: After 20 years of trying to slow the worrisome decline of theses popular game fishes, federal managers declared in 2012 that the mid Atlantic summer flounder stock was recovered. Yet, in its 2015 annual report the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (which shares management responsibility of summer flounder with the Mid Atlantic Fisheries Management Council) listed the flatfish as a species of concern. Moreover, though the latest stock assessment update (2015) determined flounder are not overfished, overfishing is still occurring. (Try saying that five times fast.) In recent history the high point of flounder landings, according to the ASMFC, was 16.5 million pounds in 2000. In the decade after that, landings have averaged only approximately five million pounds per year, with 7.4 million pounds brought to the docks in 2014.
Though the regional management approach for flounder regulations in the mid Atlantic is a welcomed step (as Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia sport fishermen are under the same basic creel limits), the ASMFC and MAFMC still have a lot of work to do to find the right combination of management strategies to increase overall abundance of summer flounder. The Board and Council are expected to develop specific plans sometime in 2016, and release them for public comment in 2017.
Flounder Fun Facts:
- The oldest summer flounder ever recorded was aged at 20 years.
- World record summer fluke is 22 pounds, seven ounces, set more than 40 years ago.
- Summer flounder are left-eyed flatfishes; both eyes appear on the left side of its body when you look at from above, with dorsal up.
- They're surprisingly aggressive fish; they ambush prey, camoflaging their thin bodies to blend in with the bottom color.
by Capt. Chris D. Dollar