[flatts1]

Thank you very much Dave. That means a lot to me coming from someone who has also taken so much time to get involved at the Council level with regard to recreational fishing issues.

Youngmoon wrote:
Very true Mike I've been keeping an eye on what Tim has to say, since I'm starting to fish for cod and haddock (and of course herring are very important for stripers and other fish) every once in a while.

Youngmoon, then you'll appreciate this. It is an excerpt from Carl Safina's "A Song for the Blue Ocean", ((c) 1997)...

From the chapter, "Ogunquit":

Aboard the Bunny Clark today, Tim Tower does not need to read about the 1500s, nor does he need his university diploma, to know what has been lost.

"We used to catch big sea pollock, twenty to forty pounds, along the shore. You never see that anymore; never see that," he says shaking his head and looking at his shoes. Sad and angry at the same time, he sees the basis of his livelyhood being chipped away and being taken apart, fish by fish.

And rock by rock. "These trawlers' net-dragging gear is destroying the rocky bottom structure and the growth on it that the fish need as habitat," Tim says. "Give you an example: There used to be a great pollock spot on the back side of Jeffreys Ledge. There was a hell of a school of pollock there. One other person knew about it, and he knew a dragger captain who was having hard times, and he took some pity on him, and he gave him the loran numbers. The next morning the dragger was working that peak. The first tow, he got eighty thousand pounds of pollock. We never caught a significant amount of pollock on that spot again. And I'll tell you something; after that dragger left, the entire bottom habitat was changed. What used to be a sharp, jagged peak on the sonar was a round, flattened hump. In the northeast corner there used to be a real sharp edge and all these little anemones and stuff used to grow there. Now it's nothing like it used to be. You can still catch pollock there occasionally, but - " Tower ends his sentence with a dejected wave of his hands.