"PERMANENT CONSERVATION AREAS!”

[Saba Slayer]

At yesterdays Fish and Game Commission meeting Eric Sklar (president of the commission) made some very disturbing statements after the public comments on the MPA reviews. The Commission and Department Staff were discussing the plan to change the MPA’s to a 10 year state wide review rather than the originally promised 5 year regional reviews.

Commissioner Sklar said…(now I’m paraphrasing his comments as I best remember them)…”I’ve looked at the documents and I can’t find it anywhere that says that the MPA’s will be reopened to fishing based on the reviews. This was never promised as far as I can see…I consider them PERMANENT CONSERVATION AREAS!”

This is a thought also expressed by Dana Murray from Heal The Bay and others during public comments. Geroge Osborn from SC and Wayne Kotow from CCA CAL both made great comments supporting the recreational fishermen during the public speaking period and supporting the reopening of the closed areas if the reviews allowed.

The only commissioner that was around during the MLPA proceedings was Jackie Hostler. She was involved in the North Coast meetings and she said that she vaguely recalled discussions about the reopening of the areas to fishermen. Not much thought or time was given to her comments, although she is probably the best avenue to try and get some concrete evidence of the reopening possibilities from the previous meetings.


The proposed Lobster Regs on the agenda went a little better…There are still some questions about the marking of the recreational floats with your Go number and what constitutes “an operator”. Hopefully this will be worked out by the time the regs are adopted at the June Commission meeting.

The hole punch idea seems to “have a lot of holes” in the regulation wording so…Craig Shuman with the Department said…” they had decided not to implement the proposed regulation at this time.” This hole punch idea will be added to the FMP “tool box” for later use.

The new Commissioner, Williams and Dana Murray from “Heal The Bay” succeeded in getting the “near consensus” LAC items included in the appendix #9.

This is a low blow as there were many items over the to 2 1/2 years of LAC meetings that achieved “near consensus”.

They picked these two items to include in the appendix…the ban on conical nets and a seasonal limit for recreational.

IMHO the ban on conical nets is unfair as it targets hoopnetters only and not the entire recreational sector…as I’ve said before…if the commercial and Ecos’s thinks that conical nets are an unfair advantage when taking lobsters, then maybe we should look at scuba as an unfair advantage when diving for lobsters. If divers give up scuba then I’d gladly give up conical style nets.

Just for the record… I am NOT against a reasonable seasonal limit. The key word here is reasonable. The commercial reps were involved in a closed door meeting with the Department and a survey was taken with the permit holders to establish the proposed trap limits on them. They came out of the meeting with the number of 300 traps and the LAC approved the number with very little discussion about changing the total.

When it was time to discuss the seasonal limit for the recs. it became a horse trading session…a 70 season limit was proposed by the Department after the rec reps had set a number of 100 in our closed door meeting…in the open meeting the Eco’s said 40 and the commercials countered at 30…the Eco’s started multiplying the number of card holders and the proposed limit numbers and came up with some ridiculous total catch numbers and scared everyone. I was often the only rec rep at the meetings so this type of intimidation was really hard to defend.

My best response to defend our rights was to get the, per trip info and did not fish data from Travis Buck (he tallies up the report cards for the Department) and present it to the other reps at the table. My other response was to tell the other reps that we as Recreational divers and Hoopers already have a possession limit (7) and gear limits (5 each - 10 max nets)….the commercials have no lobster catch limit or gear limit restrictions…as you can see we are already regulated in possession and gear.


Supposedly the Department will hold some stakeholder meetings before the adoption at the June Commission meeting… please come and speak or you’ll get the regulations you deserve for your apathy.
I'll post up the dates and times as soon as I get them.