The recreational fishing alliance,Killing all your hopes and progress so far! What a shame this is!!

[eelman]

So much for the rec's being holyer than thou!! The very orginazation that is supposed to be fighting for your recreational fisheries,is making money from DEAD fish!! Explain that!! Unreal,At least the commercials are honest and dont hide what they do! This is like the president secretly getting campaign money from drug dealers and then in public saying he wants a war on drugs.Slowly , the whole recreational fight will unraval at the seems,especially when people get wind of this! From the leader of the recreatinal "catch and release" group the "two face" RFA.............

IN THE NAME OF CONSERVATION:
BIG, BIG BUCKS FOR RECREATIONAL NON-PROFITS ©
by Anna minicucci©2000
This little fishing tid bit could be termed “kill-and-release” and/or “catch-and-kill” for big money. An e-mail, from a Massachusetts outdoor writer, sent a report written by John Geiser, who is a recreational fishing columnist for Asbury Park Press. Geiser’s fishing report revealed that a 781 lb. blue marlin brought in for a White Marlin Tournament gave great joy (make that great bucks) to the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFAwhen half the $303,000. prize money the fish won lined the RFA treasury.

Adding salt to that “conservation” wound, Geiser’s report continued, that the big blue was caught the same week a memo was circulated which indicated that a 25 percent reduction in the recreational blue marlin landings was not met, as recommended by for conservation purposes by the International Commission for Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICATT, a group charged with managing swordfish, marlin, sailfishing, and tuna). The memo was circulated by the National Marine Fisheries Service Office of Sustainable Fisheries in the name of its acting director, Bruce Morehead. He was soliciting comments on how the recreational fishery could meet the ICCAT reduction. (A-hem, Bruce!)

Rubbing more salt into the open, conservation, wound, a white marlin in the same tourney garnered $580,000 for the crew that brought it in, according to Geiser.(Apparently, launching “dead fish for conservation.”) It gets better, or more bitterly saltier. The angler, Capt. Don Gemmell, who caught the winning blue marlin, was fishing aboard a 61 foot yacht owned by Viking Yacht Corp., and the CEO of Viking is also president of RFA.

Move over commercials and give the recreationals a wide berth, they won’t feed the public with fish, but hell at the same time, they’re having fun and catching bigger bucks and fish than you are. Gads! will there be any governors on recreational fishing, or will it continue to be a kill-and-release, and/or catch-and-kill for big money purses? Or, are we looking at a stunted mentality that thinks, “as long as we conserve them, only we can kill them”?

By the way, it would appear that those illustrious, saltwater fisheries managers from locals to the Fed are in league with the RFA, and other similarily bent “conservation” organizations, because they are the groups with growing lobbying clout and money bags. If the tide has turned against commercial fishing within the public domain, and the new big fellas’ are using the old commercial lobbying tricks, then what chance can the general fishing public have in either case?