How Guiding and Conservation Go Hand in Hand

Capt. John McMurray is a renowned big-tuna and striped-bass charter captain based on Long Island, New York, and he’s been a leader with the New York arm of the Coastal Conservation Association and a long-time advocate for menhaden conservation. He’s also an oft-published outdoor writer, who currently blogs for the Marine Fish Conservation Network and has had feature articles/photography published in On The Water, Saltwater Fly Fishing, and The New York Times. In a profile by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, McMurray talks about how his conservation ethos informs his guiding practice:

Conservation enhances what I do because it creates abundance, and abundance equals opportunity. The main conservation challenge off of Long Island is that A LOT of our fisheries revolve around menhaden aggregations. We get the menhaden schools, we get predators. Every year though, the large-scale processors in Virginia sail purse-seine boats and fly spotter planes up here. They sit right off the 3-mile line and rake up hundreds of thousands of pounds of menhaden, effectively shutting down bluefin and striped bass runs. It REALLY sucks.

Click here for the full story at TRCP.org