DEEPWATER FISHERIES LOSE ANOTHER 21 DAYS
In another triumph of fishery mismanagement, NMFS, according to Steve Branstetter of the St. Petersburg, Florida office, will officially announce on Monday May 5, 2008 the closure of deepwater grouper and golden tile fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico from 12:01AM May 10, 2008 until Midnight, December 31, 2008. As far as we can determine, this means you need to be tied up to the dock and unloaded by midnight of Friday, May 9, 2008.
This is 21 days earlier (for grouper) than last year, 47 days earlier than the year before, and 66 days earlier than 2004. Also, it seems that the tilefish and deepwater grouper fisheries, despite being managed with two seperate quotas, will have somehow managed to fill those quotas on exactly the same day.
Incidentally, this happens while the official status of the yellowedge grouper stock, according the NMFS’s own most recent stock assessment is “unknown”. It also happens despite the fact that there has never been a stock assessment of the Gulf of Mexico Tilefish. However, the last stock assessment (2005) of the Mid-Alantic tilefish, which has been historically much harder fished than that of the Gulf, found that they were “not overfished and overfishing is not occurring“.
3 comments on “DEEPWATER FISHERIES LOSE ANOTHER 21 DAYS”
Leave a comment
You must be connected to write a comment.
Try getting a Bachelor of Science degree at a reputable school using the CSC method: “Control Sans Testing.”
There are people with Master’s degrees in biology or marine biology who are
working as observers on longline boats, none of them are concerned about the right things … and most of them are simply inconcerned..
They just want the big bucks and no work of riding around on a boat for a couple weeks spending maybe 3 hours daily piddling with fish and rulers, getting a tan, relaxing, etc.
NMFS is the nest of the self-propagating watermelon.
Oh … I forgot … and we’re paying for it!
Speaking of observers…
I received a registered letter last December informing me I had been selected to carry an observer for the first trimester opening of the upcoming year’s Large Coastal Shark fishery.
I called the observer program and reminded them that their own organization (NMFS) had deemed that there would BE NO first trimester opening in that fishery. I got a giggle and a mumbled explanation that they wanted to put observers on any boat going fishing that might catch a shark accidentally.
My response was “Well, even if we catch them we can’t boat them and will simply cut them loose, dead or alive, so what is the observer going to do, exactly?
I bit my tongue and didn’t fill the young woman’s ear with exactly how I felt about them protecting their own jobs, even though NMFS had made them obsolete in the process of forcing me and my crew out of our jobs.
I dunno about watermelons, but they are most certainly a cozy nest of something.