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Exactly. Too many boats & too many nets in the water. The government buys back a boat and someone else buys it from the government with a different federal loan, gets better gear, and is even more efficient than the guy he replaced... Just too much pressure and it's not like you need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out...
MikeF was mentioning how his neighbor, the commercial HOOK fisherman will probably get screwed in this but he wasn't the guy that helped cause this problem in the first place. It really was more government and guys like Kennedy, Frank, & Kerry (and a republican or too on the north shore) that kept pressuring the government to make things easier for the netters to get a bigger and bigger piece of the pie all the while understanding that the pie was getting smaller.
I don't think recs should pay the penalty as that is not the cause for fishery tanking like it did. Some additional restrictions might be tolerable, but a 63% reduction in what recs get is very unfair. While I'll agree that the recs probably catch more fish then they are currently believed too, it's a tiny percentage of the overall take, oh yeh - and there's limited mortality and no bycatch. Even in this year - supposedly the best in a decade, very few boats have half their people limiting out. I've only done it once back in 96 and seen it happen once since then in the half dozen trips I've been on.
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