In case you missed it, here’s an update on what authorities say was the largest striped bass poaching case in Chesapeake Bay history.
A fish seller from St. Mary’s County, Maryland, pleaded guilty recently in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt to interstate trafficking in illegal fish and falsifying catch reports, according to The Baltimore Sun and Associated Press.
Robert Lumpkins, of Golden Eye Seafood in Piney Point, now faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 on each of four charges. Lumpkins admitted that from 2003 to 2007, while acting as a commercial check station for the state Department of Natural Resources, he and his employees falsely recorded the amount of striped bass, or rockfish, that fishermen caught, according to the news reports.
As Bay Daily reported back in February, Lumpkins’ arrest came at the conclusion of a five-year state and federal investigation into a ring of watermen and fish sellers who allegedly avoided catch limits and caught an estimated 600,000 pounds of rockfish worth $3 million to $7 million. So far, six men have been sentenced to a total 45 months in prison in the case.
The courts should impose the maximum possible penalties on all the poachers. The restoration of striped bass in the Chesapeake during the 1980s and 1990s was a major environmental victory, achieved only through a temporary moratorium on catching rock fish. But the long-term maintenance of this success hinges on vigorous enforcement of fishing limits.
“The effects of illegal harvesting of Chesapeake Bay striped bass reach well beyond the waters of Maryland and Virginia,” wrote Roy Hoagland, Chesapeake Bay Foundation Vice President for Environmental Protection and Restoration to the judges in the case in asking for a tough sentence. “As part of their life cycle, adult striped bass spawned in the Bay migrate along the Atlantic Coast as far north as the State of Maine.”
An estimated 70 to 90 percent of all striped bass – a popular sport fish – caught along the Atlantic coast are spawned in the Chesapeake Bay. So robbing the Bay hurts not only anglers and the ecosystems here, but along the entire East Coast.
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