Well said Flap -
Those are the real issues impacting the health of the fishery.
A few years ago my wife did a documentary for Friends of the Waterfront on the history of Newport's waterfront, it's access issues and how everything is predicated on fishermen's rights going back to the King Charles Charter of 1661.
I filmed an interview she did with George Mendosa, the retired owner of the Tolman and Mack Fish Trap Co. here in Newport who was in his 80's at the time. George is famous as the Kissing Sailor in the iconic photo taken in Times Square on VJ Day.
At any rate, we got to talking about the amazing abundance of fish in our area years ago, the catch rates for striped bass going back to the late '20's when he was a kid and the current state of the fishery today.
George said the real culprit in the decimation of the stocks wasn't the commercial fisherman despite the finger-pointing - it was the housewife with her laundry detergent and all the other sources of pollution in the estuaries and rivers.
I couldn't agree with him more.
Here's a pre-WWII photo of George and his brothers tending their nets at Green Bridge, where he said the eelgrass was once so thick you could barely row through it, much less use an outboard. You'd be hard put to find eelgrass there today more than a few yards across.
It was the most important estuary on the Island and currently undergoing restoration - hopefully, it will one day recover.
Like Flap said, SF has it's own agenda - and from all I've heard and seen it's not an organization I'd want to be associated with. There are others whose goals are a lot less self-serving.