We find ourselves in an outright war for the survival of our fisheries and our way of life.  We at S.O.F.A. pledge to continue to work for the commercial fishermen in any way we can but we need your help. 

We can't continue to do this without the support of our present membership and can not continue on into the future without new members and more support. We have a lot of work ahead of us, none of it cheap and much of it needing to be done right away to head off multi-month closures in the coming years. Shark fishermen have already been virtually put out of business, grouper and snapper fishermen appear to be next in line with extended closures and larger area closures in 2009 almost a certainty if things are not changed soon.

We are faced with a growing group of ecologically minded extremist groups extremely well funded, often by Pew Trusts, and appealing to the good nature of a public who want to do the right thing but are either misinformed or uninformed about our fisheries and our way of life.  The groups like Environmental Defense Fund present a slick facade to the public and have the budget to put many retired public servants on the payroll with their names lending a credibility to the effort that their lack of expertise should preclude.

We need to counter these arguments with good solid science and good solid data that backs our assertions that the fishery in the Southeastern United States is much healthier than the extremist groups would have you believe.  These groups would be happiest if all the fish protein that the American people consumed came from farm raised fish and have said as much in many of their press releases and pseudo-studies.  If we don't step up and let our voices be heard very soon, we will go the way of the Florida gillnetters who were put completely out of business after being blamed for fishery problems that were in fact caused by the encroachment of man on the fish habitat, the building of power plants, the introduction of toxic chemicals into our bays, and the building of dams on the freshwater rivers that are so important to the inshore fishes life cycle.  These things are all an unpleasant but true side effect of our growth as a nation, but the gillnetters were blamed for the sum total of those factors. Now we have no more gillnetters and yet don't have significantly more mullet than we did a decade ago.

The offshore fisherman, both commercial and recreational, are now squarely in the sights of those who would have us believe we need them to look our for the good of all of us. The track record of those who would have us believe more regulation on top of poor regulation is the answer is not a good one. NMFS has yet to have one single successful regulatory program that they can point to, yet they continue to pile on more and more regulations apparently hoping that the next one will repair all the damage that the last one did. We all need to work now to try to keep our way of life alive.