Quote:
Originally Posted by BigFish
What makes you think that the gluttons who were taking 2 fish everyday at the canal want the take cut in half??? So why expect them to go to the meetings at all?? Not surprising!
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I agree. I think a lot of us overestimate how much the average guy out there wants catch reductions, or even whether they realize that there's a problem.
I lived through the 70s and 80s. I know that some had been warning that the stocks have been overfished for about ten years. Up until maybe 4 years ago, I'd look at the YOY charts, see one or two bad years, and think they were alarmists. But right around 2009 or 2010, I realized that I wasn't seeing spring schoolies in their usual places around the Cape. This time of the year you'd have tons of small bait in coves and you'd hear schoolies on them all night. That stopped too. The charts kept showing bad years, some even worse than the worst years in the early to mid 70s. Now all I see are big fish, concentrated on two or three places where they're easy pickings. I try telling this to people both in person, and online here and at SOL and they politely tell me that I have my head up my ass, that there are "plenty of bass", that they're all offshore, or that they're late because of the water temps, or any of the same songs that guys sang in the early 80s. And some of the choir are veterans of that era and really should know better.
I put my money where my mouth was. I haven't intentionally killed a bass since 2011, and I only fish in ways that minimize killing one unintentionally. No plugs, jigs only, and gear that lands them quickly. I don't even take most of them out of the water. I've caught thousands. I don't need any more pictures.
History has taught me that public comment meetings are a dog and pony show. I remember when 2@28" was on the table down in NY, and a couple hundred guys were in the room at SUNY-Stony Brook, and the only people who spoke in favor of it were the handful of charter/head boat guys. Guess whose opinion won the day?
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