June 29, 2015 — LEWES, Del. — An angler in Lewes set a new state record with a blueline tilefish caught earlier this month — even as regulators scramble to get control of the region’s booming tilefish harvest.

The record-setting fish was caught 65 miles off Delaware’s coast in Baltimore Canyon. It tipped the scales at 19.7 pounds — and it’s not the only one that local anglers have hauled in recently. Once most common in the Southern Atlantic, blueline tilefish have begun to make a splash further north.

Stewart Michels is a marine fisheries program manager with Delaware’s Division of Fish & Wildlife. He says the species is a whitefish sold domestically.

“It’s a sedentary fish for the most part — bottom-dwelling, slow-growing, so that makes it susceptible to over-harvest,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of data for the species; it’s a data-poor species, and particularly north of North Carolina, there’s not a lot of data available.”

That kind of data helps fishery managers set catch limits. But in the past, blueline tilefish were caught so infrequently in the mid-Atlantic that the harvest wasn’t controlled by regulators at all.

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