Scup poaching

[Mr. Sandman]

It's the law. Don't make it a law if you are not going to enforce it. Stop trying to justify breaking the law.

As for this "but the quota" thinking...the commercial people love to keep going back to the quota, the quota but the quota. The problem with the quota is many of the FISH KILLED ARE NOT PART OF THE QUOTA. Yes, there are legal fishermen who properly report landings, but many many fish escape the being counted towards the quota. For example, there are fisherman selling filleted bluefish , loin-ed tuna, comm undersized fillet bass, Tog (live and dead) directly to restaurants who don't even have a permit to buy directly from fisherman. This goes on every single day. NO ONE is checking where these restaurants got their fish and backtracking who sold it to them.

The "Quota" is a joke and in fact there is an incentive to sell it under-the-table (even beside tax reporting) ...it is not recorded toward the quota therefore it keeps the fishery open that much longer. The DMF is naive. When you see draggers going up the sound in search of squid or fluke as they say...they do not report bass. But there are rec bass guys catching them right near them. Gee...where do these fish end up? They ain't tossing them back alive... They can't sell them legally, but there is a market for them. There is so much wrong with fishery management today I don't know where to begin.