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The boats hit the Gulf of Mexico before dawn, engines rumbling out diesel smoke while dead-eyed gulls clear their throats and wait to feast on the fishermen’s leftovers.
When the sun rises off Galveston, Texas, “I think, for me, it’s like being reborn – daily rebirth,” says Buddy Guindon, a commercial fisherman who’s spent decades hauling red snapper, grouper and mackerel from the Gulf waters. “It’s like the adventure is about to begin again.”
Except when there are no fish.
Then, says charter boat captain Scott Hickman, “You would hate the sunrise, because you’re like, ‘This is going to suck.’”
It wasn’t long ago that America’s fisheries were in a state of collapse, with cratering fish stocks and impractical regulations that threatened a $180 billion dollar industry.
Then, an unlikely alliance of environmental activists and fishermen turned things around, leaving the nation’s four million square miles of fishing grounds healthier – and more profitable – than they’ve been in decades.
Back in April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at freeing commercial fishermen from unnecessary regulation to improve "one of the largest and most abundant ocean resources in the world." Federal data show a hard-fought partnership between commercial fishermen and environmentalists has done just that.
Today, more than 50 U.S. fish stocks have bounced back from disaster, or are on track to, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are three times more red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico than in 2009. In Cape Cod and the Gulf of Maine, stocks of adult yellowtail flounder have jumped from 218 metric tons in 2006 to 3,800 metric tons in 2020.
And U.S. commercial fishing jobs grew 38% percent between 2011 and 2022.
All thanks to a system of “catch shares” that has fishermen catching less while earning more.
“If you can imagine a group of commercial fishermen hearing from the environmentalists how they're going to fix things for you? Fixing things for a commercial fishery meant we'd be catching less fish and spending less time doing it,” Guindon told USA TODAY. “So when they came up with an actual solution that made our business better – it was very shocking.”
Fighting for ‘the last fish’
If you’ve had cable TV at any time in the last 20 years, you’ve probably clicked past or stopped to watch one of half a dozen reality shows featuring grizzled commercial fishermen duking it out with nature and each other on the high seas.
Think “The Deadliest Catch” and “Killer Tuna.”
Those shows come from a time when fisheries were collapsing and regulations meant to save them forced fishermen into a daily sprint to the bottom.
Under the old rules, fishermen had a daily catch limit and a federally mandated season, meaning every boat hit the water every allowable day, even in dangerous conditions.
“Well, I can tell you honestly, I held my head in my hands and cried because of the choice I made to be a commercial fisherman,” said Guindon, who starred in the NatGeo reality series “Big Fish Texas.” “And on days when it was so rough we couldn't fish and we were already out there and we had to stay 'till we got our 2,000 pounds – it was tough.”
Rules meant to protect fisheries were instead pushing fishermen to grab everything they could, every possible day.
“There were perverse economic incentives,” Jane Lubchenco, a former chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told USA TODAY. “If they didn’t catch that last fish, someone else would.”
‘Oh, this is big'
Enter the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, which started lobbying lawmakers in Washington and doubtful fishermen on three coasts to take a chance on a system that allowed fishermen to catch as much as they wanted on any given day, while reducing their overall seasonal catch by as much as half.
“It felt like this story was a disaster that was already written and it couldn't be turned around,” said EDF Executive Director Amanda Leland. Working together, regulators, fishermen and activists "put in place a different kind of management system that provided an economic incentive for them to be conservationists.”
If daily limits disappeared, fishing boats could make fewer trips, creating vast savings on fuel. U.S. commercial fishermen were burning, on average, a half-ton of diesel for every ton of fish they caught. Sometimes the day’s haul didn’t pay for the day’s fuel.
Many were skeptical. Guindon voted “No” in 2006 when his landing area considered whether to implement the catch share system. He lost.
“I waited for three months and looked at my books and said, ‘Oh, this is big. We've reduced our cost by 80%, and we've increased our profit by 100%,’” he recalled. “It was a good thing I didn't win that vote.” Guindon became an evangelist for catch shares, converting fishermen across the country.
Since the adoption of the catch shares system, fish have returned at rates “faster than anyone imagined,” Lubchenco said. As fisheries recover, annual allotments get bigger.
In 2006, Gulf commercial and sport fishermen were limited to 6 million pounds of red snapper each year. That limit reached 16 million pounds in 2024, putting more money in fishermen’s pockets and more seafood on the table.
‘Buy American,’ fishermen say
The ongoing recovery has led to a glut of American seafood in a market that critics say is hooked on inexpensive foreign imports.
“Since our fisheries have gone through this metamorphosis…we have more fish in the ocean than we can actually sell right now,” said Guindon, who’s been touring the country with Hickman to promote a new book, “Sea Change,” by writer James Workman and EDF Executive Director Leland.
“The restaurant industry here in the United States is addicted to that cheap imported stuff,” Hickman said. “And I think that people need to be more educated on what they eat.”
With a spate of recent food recalls, including one for radioactive shrimp imported from Southeast Asia, shoppers and restaurants have a reliable option – if only they’ll buy American, Hickman said. “Safe, sustainable, locally sourced, healthy seafood is what Americans really want.”
Actual bipartisanship
The catch shares system, and the recovery of the country’s fisheries, has been implemented across several presidential administrations and has so far managed to evade partisan warfare.
“The ocean and the fisheries, they don't know anything about politics, okay?” Hickman said. “Fish don't care about politics. Having healthy, sustainable oceans, healthy, sustainable stocks of fish we can harvest…is a bipartisan thing.”
As commercial fishing profits have gone up, 94% percent of assessed fisheries in the U.S. are now sustainable, according to NOAA.
“This has persisted despite all the crazy politics because it works,” Lubchenco said.
'Fun to go fish'
At times Guindon sounds as if he can't believe the turnaround.
“The first 20-plus years of my career were spent in a race for fish, where the government told me when I would go fish, how many I would catch, and when I would bring them in and when my season would start and end,” he said. “That was a race for fish that made my life terrible.”
“I missed birthdays, baseball games – all the firsts for my kids growing up...But now I don't have to do that anymore," he added. "I can go fish whenever I feel like it, and I'm fishing in a fishery that's rebuilt – so it's fun to go fish.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How America's fisheries rebounded from collapse and over-regulation
Reporting by Dan Morrison, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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