Quote:
Originally Posted by frugalfisherman
Who wants to go seabass fishing in January and February? Not me!
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Ha! You’d be surprised how many do. For some, it's a tradition but to each their own and lets not put the cart in front of the horse! The one thing I wanted to be very pointed about here is let's first focus on getting more fish since everyone can agree on that. The thing that many people fail to realize is it's not the feds that decide our Seabass season and bag limits, the states do and we could carve them up however we'd like.
The problem is the feds give us a certain amount of fish and although the state decides how to carve them up, the feds then put the options we submit into their model and will deny anything the model feels has a possibility of exceeding what they'd given us.
So if you want more days in Feb you'd have to take away from lets say May. Or if you want more then 1 fish in the summer months you'd have to take fish away in the spring.
When we submit comments to the feds like we want we want more fish in the summer or give us back our winter they're thinking it's not their decision, go talk to the people in your state who set your regs.
Having more fish solves a lot of these horse trading issues and would be a nice problem to have so lets get more fish and we can then figure out how we'd like to carve them up.
This is why you can't wait to get involved until the late winter, early spring at the state meetings where the regulations are decided. It's too late then and all your doing is fighting over the scaps the feds give us.
The good news here is when the time comes, we in NJ have a very smart person on our DEP staff Peter Clarke who is our Senior Fisheries Biologist. He understands how the feds model works, is respected by them and is also a die hard fisherman.
We also have a state marine fisheries council that's come a long way since I've been following this for the last 25 years. They're approachable, accountable and made regulation setting a lot more transparent then it's ever been.
Does this mean you or me is going to get what we specifically want? Hell no but at least all these decisions are made in the light of day and public comments are no longer hidden, they are accounted for and openly discussed at the meetings.
Right now people's eyes are probably glazed over with all this detail and many might be thinking Gerry's drank the Coolaid, the system ate him and he's one of them now.
If you want the system to work to your advantage and get things done, you need to know how the systems work, who the players are, which ones want same thing that you do and when, where and how to get organized and involved.
Lets get the feds to give us more fish first.. If we accomplish that, each of us has a better chance to get the regs we want in our state, rather then fighting over the same amount of scraps.
