Resident marine sportfishing effort in the United States varied non-monotonically with COVID policy stringency

Governments responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with different policies to curtail the spread of the virus. We show how sportfishing levels are related to the stringency of Covid-19 policies. Specifically, we relate the total number of resident sportfishing trips taken each month in each of 16 U.S. states to a state-level index of COVID policy stringency. We model the number of recreational fishing trips taken in each state-month using a fixed effect Poisson regression model with state-specific seasonality and time trends. We estimate separate models for different fishing modes, and find that for fishing trips taken on private boats the number of trips may have increased by approximately 20% at moderate levels of stringency, while at high levels of stringency like those experienced in many states in March and April of 2020, trips may have stayed constant or declined by 10-20%. Similar inverse-U shaped relationships between trips and stringency are found for fishing trips from the shore and from charter boats.