Interesting article on Rec Cod Fishing in this morning's Bahstin Globe

[cocco7]

I'm an avid deep sea fisherman, and have seen first hand what operations are like on both commercial and party type fishing boats. What destroyed the fishing economy in the first place was the gill nets, they killed just about everything they came in contact with and ripped up the bottom like a plow removing snow from your street in the winter. Any undersize fish caught in a gill net were usually took damaged to survive, and what's worse is that the lazy or poor fisherman would leave their gill nets out for several days and allow large amounts of fish to spoil in the water.

To give everyone an idea of how this affected the habitat there are still very many "lost" gill nets roaming the bottom of the ocean that continue to kill schools of fish, that because of their composition will never decompose. The resurgence of large catches on hook and line fishing is the product of the banks (georges, tillies, and cashes ledge) being closed to the netters and the populations being allowed to reproduce the way it should happen. It's also illogical to assume that because hook and line fisherman are taking more fish that the population is being harmed because we don't fully understand what the current status of the population of cod is, but we know that it is growing because the schools are denser and located in closer proximity to each other.

This is an arguement that is made from jealous commercial fisherman who are upset the cod are returning and they can't get at them, while overlooking the fact that they nearly killed the species off in the north atlantic years ago. To allow netters to go back to their old ways, despite the innovations and regulations on the new "safer" nets would do nothing more than put us back to where we were in the late 1980's and say "okay they're back, go and deplete them again"

I'm in favor of larger size limits on Cod and a smaller take for a day, but let's compare apples to apples and see what the real impact commercial fishing has besides just the number of fish they take each trip.