Posted on 07/05/2011 8:41:32 AM PDT by george76
Captains issue S.O.S., claiming new rules meant to save the fish are killing their way of life.
With the height of the New England fishing season getting under way this week, small family fishermen say controversial new rules are destroying their livelihood — forcing them to sell their boats and instead search for work as laborers on larger vessels.
“It’s a death knell. It’s the beginning of the end for small fishermen,” said Rhode Island fisherman Joel Hovanesian, 54, who recently sold his boat.
Plymouth fisherman Stephen Welch, 50, a father of two, said: “We’re in a crisis right now.”
Figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show larger operations appear to have benefited.
...
Tina Jackson, president of the American Alliance for Fishermen and their Communities: “This has been so devastating to communities up and down the East Coast. . . . It’s a bad program. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t save fish stock.”
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Indeed.
Reich just hates the word ‘small’!
The United States of America does NOT ‘do’ central planning.
Kinda sounds like the small farmer doesn’t it. Government will put them all out of business with all the regulations. Our government, especially this administration, uses regulations as law, instead of going through Congress as it should be.
And what do the large crony-capitalist owners do with the profits they make now that competition is gone? Funnel it into more campaign contributions to Obama so he makes more regulations restricting competition.
Small independent operations are being destroyed by big government at the behest of the giant commercial fishers.
Meanwhile foreign vessels ply American waters illegally far into STATE waters.
And recreational fishing regulations are so tight you have to get a daily update to make sure you’re compliant.
If the goal is to replemish the stock then only imposing rules on American boats in international waters is doomed to fail.
The Founding Father declared armed rebellion against such Tyranny 235 years ago yesterday...
When I was a kid growing up in Portsmouth, NH, my dad and I often ran our boat a few miles offshore to jig up Cod and haddock. They were plentiful. Then the Russian trawlers moved in a swept the groundfish clean. The 200 mile limit went into effect, one trawler was seized and slowly the haddock and cod began coming back. But that didn’t last. Our own boats became so good at finding fish, netting up entire schools, that the cod got bad again, haddock in close waters non-existent, flounder and even species that were never on the table like pollock disappeared by the end of the 90’s. I went 30 miles offshore to Jeffrey’s Ledge a week ago and saw two draggers essentially vacuuming fish off the bottom. This can’t go on forever, if your business is unsustainable you need to get one that works. But you don’t get to destroy an entire resource before you go under.
The Obamanites are in favor of the little guy ! Right ! They would prefer you to work for a large corporation where you can be easily controlled and “managed” versus being an independent business. A person who is independent is considered a threat to our elitists society !
It’s pretty simple, really. The commercials just took too many fish. They will keep taking too many fish until there are no fish to take. Or rather, they will take more and more of fewer and fewer. The resource will collapse, like Striped bass did in the 70’s, then when (or if) it recovers a decade or two later the dance of depletion will resume. Meanwhile the stocks take hideous genetic damage. Size limits, for example, on Cod require small fish under 24’ to be thrown back. Result? Cod over 24” are rare. The fish have bred themselves small to survive the pressure.
A superb rule of thumb is that, if you’re worried about a shortage of critters, of about any kind, then - make more critters!
Ducks unlimited was founded by California duck hunters, because there were too few ducks, and not enough good habitat for them, both to propagate in, and for hunting. So over the course of years, they slowly changed that situation, to the point where California is up to its eyebrows in ducks and such water fowl, so much so that natural controls, like communicable disease, are intervening to control their numbers.
And there is no reason in the world this can’t be done with fish. There is even a technique to do so. And it’s not particularly expensive, either.
To start with, you go out to sea far enough away from the coast so that any pollution you generate won’t matter. Then you make a wide ring of pontoons, with a small, anchored craft to guide them. Then you descend several layers of nets, to keep in your hatchery fish and keep out the predators.
The hatchery fish are well fed, parasite free, and have been fed antibiotics to keep them healthy. Put inside these nets, and fed “Purina fish chow”, in naturally aerated water whose current keeps everything clean, they grow up big and healthy.
In past the idea was that when ready for harvest, you just hoist the inner net up into a refrigerator ship to take them to a processing plant.
However, if the wild fish are depleted, you take the fish to where the wild populations hang out, and release them. They breed well with the wild fish, improving the species as well as significantly increasing its numbers.
In short order, the entire ecosystem is improved. There are more fish, and they are healthier, and they provide more food for predators, so there are soon more predators as well.
No reason to limit fishing, and such pontoon fish farms can be so productive that soon it can just specialize in breeding rarer and rarer species of fish. The majority of production will be “whitefish”, that are several breeds that people like to eat, but again, taking the pressure off of fishermen.
Ask yourself this: how in line with Conservative principle is it to spend public money to make fish that you then dump into the ocean so that private individuals can hoover up those public-owned fish and sell them for a profit?
There are some big differences, here. I am well aware that lake salmon are of poor quality, but the fish I am talking about are first generation, from wild, hatchery fish. And they are not raised for long in the hatchery before they are essentially put back in their wild environment.
The only difference between them and wild fish is antibiotics, a lack of parasites, and that they are fed instead of having to find their own food.
And granted, not having been raised *as much* in the wild, their attrition will be high, but they are still “wild”, not domestic, and much healthier than their wild competition.
And public funding is really not at issue, here, other than perhaps start up money. The fishermen themselves would co-op to pay for operations, as it is of direct benefit to them. That is, with no fishing limit other than luck, and far less government control, they can do what they want to do, fish.
If the season is awful, they can not release the pontoon fish, but haul them up in their net, then split the dividends to keep themselves economically viable until the next season.
I read the whole article and couldn't find the height requirement ...
I'm 5'6" ... does that mean I'm a small fisherman?
I'm so confused ...
I don’t think it is only the Dems who do this, the corporations have been using regulations as a backhanded way of putting smaller competition out of business.
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