Quote:
Originally Posted by Sea Dangles
My next door neighbor has a house in Sandwich and loves to walk the canal.He starts at the boat basin and gets in his 4 or 5 miles on a regular basis. He tells me yesterday about the fishermen with six cows lined up behind them on the cell phone."Wake up Jr. please dear,and you come down too.I need three people here so I don't get arrested...."He says he gets asked all the time if he wants a fish by complete strangers just so they can kill more.A real thrill it must be!
|
I know a few guys who were taking two fish 40"+ on a morning tide, going home, changing their clothes just in case an EPO noticed them, and coming back for the afternoon tide to take 2 more. 80 lbs of fish a day, killed for ego alone.
Quite a few others took their two fish a day, every day of a run. Nothing illegal about it, but still--how much fish does any one person need? Some would spend most of the day on the phone trying to get their relatives, friends, and neighbors to take some of the fish off their hands.
How many times have all of us been in the position of releasing a decent sized fish, and have the guy next to us say something like, "hey, if you were going to put it back, why didn't you offer it to me first?".
Greed and ego cross the rec/comm border. The rec sector lives in a glass house if all they do is throw stones at the comms for the dwindling stocks. There's waste and greed all over.
All of the problems revert back to the management philosophy---"maximum sutainable yield". As George rightly points out, there's a 5 year lag between decreasing returns and effective steps to correct it. What "maximum sustainable yield" was in 2006 is different than what it is in 2011. But we're still using that F=.30 figure as the yardstick. If the stock assessments are correct, we have seen a 40% decrease in the stock biomass over the last 5 years. So we can't go on managing the stocks by allowing for killing 30% of them per year.