One fish, two fish, no fish a dollar, all for federal regulations on the recreational harvest of red snapper stand up and holler.

Hear that? That’s the deafening sound of silence over here on the western end of the Gulf of Mexico after regulators said last week the 2010 red snapper limits could be the strictest ever.

How strict? The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to recommend a one fish per day creel limit or a 30-day season. This year the daily creel limit was two, the lowest it’s ever been, and the season was less than three months long starting June 1 and ending Aug. 15.

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Why the reduction when biologists and recreational fishermen agree apparently red snapper are plentiful in the Gulf? Recreationals had a 2.4 million pound quota and they exceeded it by 1 to 2 million pounds despite that shortest-ever season, according to Roy Crabtree.

Crabtree, who sets the annual snapper quota for the NMFS, said anglers probably caught fewer fish this year but the tasty fish were larger than the average. He admitted that could be a sign of a healthy fishery or that people threw back smaller fish and just kept the big ones.

Either way, he said, “It looks like it’s working. It just makes a lot of people mad in the process.”

Bob Shipp, University of South Alabama chair and professor, Department of Marine Sciences, said the average size of Gulf red snapper harvested this year was 5 pounds compared to about 31⁄2 pounds last year. And, he said, yes, recreational fishermen, including charter boat captains and avid offshore fishermen in the Teche Area, are mad as hornets.

“Welcome to the club. Most everybody feels that way,” Shipp said Thursday.

This year’s recreational harvest was heavier than expected because the fish caught were bigger than the 3.5 pounds predicted by the federal agency’s computer models, Shipp said. As a result, the quota and season were based on the pounds of fish caught and not the number. Earlier in the week, Shipp told the Press-Register (Mobile, Ala.), “That’s the problem here. The fishermen are going to be punished because the snapper population is doing better than the federal scientists expected.”

Still, Shipp and others, including some in the NMFS, believe the numbers are flawed this year because of the way the harvest “count” was taken. Among other methods, the results depend on a series of phone calls, a survey that is “fatally flawed,” Shipp told The Daily Iberian.

“That’s part of the data that go into the model, data from commercial landings, data from recreational landings, data from government surveys �” all that info is fed into the model” that is used for the stock assessment, he said.

“The phone survey (random calls to people living in coastal counties and parishes) is based on memories and that’s the flaw.”

Citing poor quality, Congress banned the NMFS from using the phone survey in January. However, despite that action as well as a lawsuit, the federal agency once again will rely on the National Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey to set red snapper limits for 2010.

A February meeting will decide how to reach a reduction for recreationals after they reportedly went 40 percent over the quota in 2009. The new season likely will be announced in April.

Malcolm Migues of New Iberia, who started fishing red snapper when he was 14, expressed his disappointment in the news last week.

“You’re kidding me,” the 57-year-old saltwater angler said.

“I felt like they’d go the opposite way when they get indications the stocks seem stronger than they knew. It’s gotten to where it’s so disgusting I don’t even like worrying about it any more,” Migues said Friday while deer hunting in South Carolina.

“It’s hard to swallow that we can’t go target that any more,” he said. “It’s hard to go fishing and catching all the snapper you want and them telling you there’s a shortage,” he said.

Migues fishes offshore in a 38-foot Pacemaker he co-owns with Jacques Hebert of Jeanerette.

Forty-year-old Benji Hoffpauir, a veteran Iberia Parish school bus driver who owns Iberia Propeller Service, reacted like Migues.

“It don’t make no sense. This year’s the best year (red snapper fishing-wise) I ever had. We did not keep a snapper under 12 pounds this year,” Hoffpauir said.

The Loreauville outdoorsman has been fishing for red snapper eight years. He recalled fishing offshore 10 straight days this summer out of Cocodrie and each days catching 600 pounds of fish, mostly amberjack, grouper, mangrove snapper and the small limit of red snapper.

They caught red snapper as close as 20 miles offshore.

“There were fish everywhere,” he said.