"Chuck Gould" wrote in message
oups.com...

NOYB wrote:


I don't think that everybody whould catch his/her own fish. But curbs
need
to be imposed on commercial fishing.

The commercial guys take 89% of the grouper out of the Gulf...yet they
keep
reducing the limits for recreational anglers.


That makes no sense.

I would agree that the two facts you present don't seem to make sense
when isolated.

The missing brick in the logic wall would have to be, "What has
happened to the commercial fish limit?" Is it the same as ever, is it
increasing while the recreational fishermen are being cut back, or are
the commercial fishermen experiencing a reduced limit along with the
recreationals? I certainly don't know the answer, but it could be that
a scarce resource is still being distributed about like it always has
been.


Major problem is bycatch. Depending on the fishing method, here can be huge
amounts of bycatch. Very valuable fish, but since the season is closed on
them or the allotment for the dragger is already met, they are shoveled
overboard. There is always a 5 mile line of birds feeding behind a drag
boat. The jig boats or hook and line guys are not raping the resource, most
are starving, except for stick fisherman (a live fish for the Asian market
trade) which can rape the resource also. The rapists are the big net boats.
We have whole schools of tuna wrapped by a net boat or two. Zero escape to
propagate the species. Off Tijuana, MX they have 100s of pens where they
raise the smaller tuna that have been netted and feed copious amounts of
bait fish. The bait fish overfishing is probably even more harmful. There
is a lot of herring netted in the SF bay for the roe. The rest is used as
fish meal fertilizer. The catch was dropping off, so the netters have
asked for a smaller net opening size. Now you are going to catch all the
spawners, just not the large herring. If I can get the link to work, I will
post it to a writeup from a friend who used to be on the PFMC.