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.
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