Some serious politicking going on…
Man, put a question that has the potential to make a few people “grouper millionaires” up for a vote and watch ‘em scramble out of the woodwork.
The mailman has had something fishy to put in my box every day. First my ballot for the referendum, then a series of letters and flyers telling me how my family will starve and Pinellas County will break off and fall into the Gulf of Mexico and the skies will open and rain for forty days and nights if I even THINK about voting no to the IFQ proposal. I also got one mailout stating a (mostly emotional) case for voting against the proposal. Every one relies on, um, well, exaggerations and stretching of the truth. Interestingly enough the guy who mailed out the one urging a no vote was decent enough to send out a second mailing and recant a couple of misrepresentations he had included in the first mailing.
All the “vote yes” guys are happy to let any lies or misrepresentations stand as is, it seems.
Me, I’m torn. If I act out of personal greed or simply watch out for my own ass, so to speak, I don’t see how I can vote against it. I stand to get a fairly decent amount of shares, even though I’m probably the poster child for “They couldn’t have picked worse years” for the qualifying years. Interestingly enough, I’ve seen a couple of mentions of appeals for the process from the NMFS but they continue to stress that “No hardship appeals will be considered”.
Well, okay, I’ll concede that the fact that my kid got killed at the beginning of the second year of the six used for qualifying is not the NMFS fault and they did, after all, let me throw out one year. Problem there is that production on my boat dropped off precipitously right after my daughter lost her life in a car accident and has not even now, years later, returned to the historical level I had and had maintained for 20 years previous to that incident.
So, forget the hardship appeal. Can’t have everyone crying up a mess for the NMFS to have to consider. We’re worrying about the fish here, not the fishermen.
So ok then — speaking of worrying about the fish — I have one more problem.
During the late 90s there were a number of bottom longline boat owners in the Gulf of Mexico, myself included, who were “lucky” enough to get directed shark permits. Some of us heeded the advice being given out by both scientists and fishcrats to diversify. We were told back then that if we all continued to target grouper 12 months a year the fish couldn’t take the pressure and soon we wouldn’t be able to continue our evil ways. So, okay we said, we’ll go ahead and target some sharks. We’ll see if the regulatory measures already taken of limiting entry, establishing trip limits, and limiting total allowable catch along with the strategy of varying opening dates and length of seasons as well as splitting the yearly season into three “trimester openings” can make the shark fishery something that we can work in for the future and diversify a little bit, see if we can’t make both the fishcrats and the groupers happy before they put us all out of business.
So…what happened? The shark fishery seemed to be doing great. In fact, we had an excellent year in 2006 and were poised to have another one in 2007. That was until the figures changed so drastically over a two month period that the first opening of 2007 was changed at the last minute from 120 days to ZERO. The fishcrats declared that we did so well the previous year that we must have caught them all and we had to stop targeting the particular species of shark that was our bread and butter for at least a zillion years. They the proceeded to summarily close down the fishery with less than a month’s notice. Nice.
So anyway, the point is, while we were putting all these sharks on the dock, we weren’t putting any groupers on the dock. We had been told, in fact, that the best thing for the fishery and FOR OUR OWN FUTURES was to diversify and put something else across that unloading dock. Well, I was putting over 30,000 lbs of shark a year over the dock from 2000 to 2004 while I was doing my part and putting less pressure on the grouper stock. Can I count some of that towards my grouper shares since they have shut down the shark fishery I diversified to and now the only permit I have worth using is the reef fish permit?
No, of course not.
I don’t know how they would do it any differently. I don’t know how they can possibly do it and come up with a system of allocation that is going to be totally fair to everybody. One problem is, the system in place so heavily favors the bigger and better funded operations that it naturally works against the majority of the actual participants in the fishery. Numbers in a computer can never quantify with any accuracy what is actually going on in the fishery, who is participating and to what extent they are participating. Nor can they determine who deserves to be able to continue participating on into the future.
Nor do those numbers accurately quantify who should be put into a position to profit hugely from a government program being put into place supposedly to benefit the fishery and the fishermen.
I just don’t know. It’s hard to not look at the whole mess and just say “well, at least if it goes through it will give me a way to sell out and step away with a little return for all the years and all the work I have invested in the fishery.”
Screw it. Who wants the first bid on my shares?
