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In a recent post on one of the S.O.F.A. blogs, there is a quote from a letter that Stephen Bartlett, a Panhandle Dive Shop owner, dive master, commercial fisherman, charter fisherman, and spear fisherman wrote recently. The guy owns N2Deep Dive Shop in Apalachicola and has been diving and fishing the area waters for more than a decade. Of course, what he has seen isn't as important to the NMFS as what some scientist making a "research cruise" paid for by a government grant happened to see when he made some failed attempts to catch a few fish to come up with data. Hell, Steve's a fisherman four or five times over, he's GOT to be a liar, right? From Steve's letter to the Gulf Council:
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Bill Tracker
H.R. 1584: Flexibility in Rebuilding American Fisheries Act of 2009 has been introduced and has been sent to the House Committee on Natural Resources . A similar version of this bill has died in committee the past two years. Please do not let this happen this year. This bill proposes nothing more than a common sense approach to fishery regulation that should have been in the re-authorized Magnuson-Stevens Act from the beginning and will help provide some desperately needed relief for beleaguered commercial fisheries and fishermen.
Help bring this to the attention of your Congressmen and Senators. They don't use email so you will have to go to the websites of your Congressman and our two Senators (or your own if you aren't in Florida). The Florida Delegation's contact links and an example message you can copy and paste into the message box on their website are here.
You can track what we need to be the steady progress of this bill through Congress with the widget below.