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.

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.