The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries declared on May 23, 2024 that the state will not have a recreational season for flounder in 2024. The reason for the closure is due to overages from previous flounder seasons.
The DMF has not issued a press release on this yet, but sources that attended the agency’s meeting in Beaufort, NC have relayed the ruling to us.
The matter of flounder season did not come to a vote. Instead, the overages from last year (or the past several years) were noted as the reason for the continued closure. As part of the state’s most recent flounder regulations over the past few years, future seasons could be shortened or even canceled if one recreational season resulted in more flounder being caught than the Total Allowable Catch, a number set by DMF before each season.
For instance, during North Carolina’s 2022 recreational flounder season, DMF had set the Total Allowable Catch at 170,655 pounds. The estimated recreational catch for that season was 226,995 pounds, an overage of 56,340 pounds.
The 2023 season also resulted in an overage, which was added to the previous year’s. DMF determined that these overages have cut into what 2024’s Total Allowable Catch would have been, so severely, that they determined it was best to cancel any plans for a 2024 recreational harvest season.
We expect to see an official release from NCDMF soon, and we will update our readers accordingly.