Sent by VMRC related to errors in last year reporting of Striped Bass caught inside ches Bay....last year's numbers are under reveiw?    I have not a clue what this means for the fall fishery? 

Please know that there has been a situation with the Virginia striped bass data, for 2007.  Currently, it is under review by the NMFS.    The problem is tied to the county of Accomack, in that the interviewers assigned all of the interview results, for that county, to the ocean component, rather than the Inland component.  Inland = Chesapeake Bay, Potomac River, and Seaside bays and Inlets, and I have typical gotten NMFS to post-stratify the data to get at the Chesapeake only landings, to match those to our quota.

NMFS told me today that there are about 700 interviews, with mis-assigned data.  NMFS says it can't go back to these interviews and subjectively decide which interviews and which species rightly belong in the Inland or ocean component.  NMFS told me they will develop a model that will at least, by early July, give some sense of what our landings were.

What this means is that I earlier sent you an estimate in February 2008 of the 2007 landings, and it "looked like" the 2007 Chesapeake Bay landings were under the harvest quota of 1.5 million pounds by about 300,000 pounds. The expectation, like other years, was that this February preliminary result would end up close to the final estimate.  The problem, right now, is we know there is a problem with the data, but we do not yet know what the final estimate is.  Again, NMFS, thinks an estimate will be available in early July.  If that estimate indicates an underage of the quota still exists, that will give us time to meet with the ad hoc committee before we approach the Commission with any options.

If there is an underage, some of you have pinpointed weather events, as the responsible cause, rather than regulations. This and the reality that there were overages the previous 7 years (2001-06) means there may be some caution, from us, in relaxing regulations, even should the NMFS final estimate show the fishery harvest was below the 2007 quota.