I have not Blogged in a while because I have not been fishing on my boat. My electronics were at the shop for repair, so I was out to lunch, so to speak. Don’t feel too bad for me though. I have fished a few times on some friends’ boats and we were able to get our limit of the “extinct” (sarcasm intended) American Red Snapper. On the last trip we got our limit in 90 minutes (so much for the shortage of snapper).
Here are just a few pictures taken this month to prove my point.
Nothing like the smile on the face of a kid with his first big snapper, eh?
Here’s what is going to make this post a bit different from my previous posts. What I hope to do is get you interested in helping us fight to keep our right to fish. Yes, there are federal agencies closing fishing all around the USA. In our area of the country its the SAFMC I won’t go into great detail here because I don’t want to scare you away with the zillions of acronyms they use and the dodgy language in the law that was amended a few years back. See Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act of 2006 In a nutshell the act requires the various commissions to end “over fishing” by 2010. The Act requires the commissions to use the “Best Available Science” to determine if “over fishing” is occurring. This sounds just fine; does it not. Who can argue with using the best available science? Who would want to use the poorest available science? Well, when there is no method, no science available to count the fish the recreational fishermen catch, they just use something in the files developed to do something else and then call it “The Best Available Science”. See Best Available Data =BAD Data, What Data?
Here’s what they really do. They make a few random phone calls to land lines in coastal counties and ask “did you catch any fish?” They drop a few fish traps in random location in the ocean. One think about snapper and grouper is that they live around structure, like rocks. If you drop a fish trap in the sand off the beach you will never catch a snapper or grouper. If you did that would you conclude that there are no snapper or grouper? They do. LOL Oh and they look at a coastal state and count the number of registered boats. They they assume that those boats fish for snapper and grouper in the ocean. Imagine the 18ft pontoon boat owner 30 miles offshore! LOL So you have 902,964 boats registered in Florida. You multiply that total by some arbitrary fudge factor number reducing it to the number of fishing boats. They you multiply that number by the number of fishermen per boat (go ahead, just make that up too), I’ll use 3. So, lets see we have. 902964 x .75x 3= 2,031,669 snapper per day; really??? This is the “best science”. You see, they don’t really count recreational fish like they do commercially caught fish. They have no idea how many snapper the recreational fisher takes in a day. I’d be the first to line up requesting that they close the fishery if my experience validated the extrapolation that they come up with, but my friends and I see lots of red snapper during the time of year we should see them.
I will be asking for your help in a few weeks to put some pressure on our Senators and Congressmen. I will post and email a link to an electronic petition asking the Federal Government to fix the broken fisheries system. When you get this, please sign it, even if you don’t fish.If you are reading this Blog then you sure know someone who does fish. Email it to your friends and ask them to help.
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