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Clearly the number of recreational boats chasing BFT in the northeast has increased over the past few years. But the reason is that there have simply been a lot more tuna around. I would hope that NMFS could find a better way than C&R only to manage the recreational take.
I personally like the idea of a tagging system; however, NMFS would then have to police it (i.e., $$). I'd even support something along the lines of 5 tags per season, with each tag expiring in a given month (i.e., one tag for each of June, July, August, September, and October). That would be one fish per vessel per month with no ability to transfer tags to another vessel or carry-over to another month.
At least it would be superior to a no-take approach and allow us recreational guys to keep some fish.
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