The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is meeting this week in Annapolis. I went to their menhaden meeting today and, as promised, thought I'd give you a recap:

Omega Protein Co., the large reduction fishery based in Reedville, will not hit the cap the commission imposed this year, according to state predictions. The commission capped the harvest at 109,000 metric tons last year, but Omega only got half of that with their 10 boats. The cap is just for the Chesapeake Bay.

"The industry appears to be concentrating its efforts on older fish on the coast that obviously have more oil content," said Jack Travelstead, who is deputy commissioner of the Virginia Marine Fisheries Commission. "The reduction boats are going to oceanside."

So, according to the commissioners, Omega is going north to catch menhaden-perhaps even as far north as Maine. Though every East Coast state except Virginia and North Carolina has banned industrial menhaden fishing, Omega can still fish in federal waters.

There was no talk of Gilchrest's menhaden bill, which would ban fishing in federal and state waters. I asked Travelstead about it after the meeting and he said it wasn't necessary...more about that in my story tomorrow in The Sun.

Anyway, back to the meeting:

NOAA has 17 projects to study menhaden, which are costing them (and us) just north of $5 million.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources is doing part of that work, flying over the bay to find schools of menhaden. They have not found many, and none in the upper bay.

One of the commissioners suggested that the bay was too polluted to house the schools. That the pollution, not the overfishing, was the source of the problem.

The commission will continue to study the issue. But in the meantime, several people who have been pushing for menhaden restrictions have said they are glad Gilchrest is taking up the issue with his bill.

H. Bruce Franklin, author of "The Most Important Fish in the Sea," said such a move is long overdue and should have been done more than 100 years ago, when Congress talked about it but decided not to act because it could have violated a treaty with England.

I'll end with a quote from Franklin:

"Ten years from now, the menhaden reduction industry will not exist.  The only question is how that will come about.  Either the industry will fish itself out of existence while grinding up the living keystone of our entire marine ecology, or we will stop it first."