Tag Archives: South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council
NCFA Weekly Update for March 18, 2024
The South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council (SAFMC) met the first full week of March in Jekyll Island, Georgia. The main items discussed at this meeting were king and Spanish mackerel tournament sales, Black Sea bass, red snapper, for-hire reporting, and the commercial permitting structure in the snapper grouper fishery. King and Spanish mackerel tournament sales were discussed by the council but no votes were taken on this issue. It is my understanding that the council wants to wait and see what the public has to say about tournament sales and many other mackerel related issues at the upcoming mackerel port meetings before making any decisions. As always if you have any questions or comment please reach out. more, >>click to read<< 10:46
Controversy brewing over snapper-grouper Exempted Fishing Permit
A storm is brewing in the South Atlantic region, a storm of controversy over snapper-grouper fisheries access and allocation. A group of four commercial fishing businesses – the South Atlantic Commercial Fishing Collaborative – filed an Exempted Fishing Permit (EFP) application with the National Marine Fisheries Service on Feb. 6. If approved by NMFS, the EFP would allow a group of 25 snapper-grouper boats operated by the four businesses to harvest blueline tilefish, gag grouper, gray triggerfish, greater amberjack, vermilion snapper and species in the jacks complex for two years (2018-19) in a pilot program while being exempt from numerous fishing regulations. The generic name for such a fisheries management method is catch shares, which, according to NOAA Fisheries, is a program in which “a portion of the catch for a species is allocated to individual fishermen or groups. Each holder of a catch share must stop fishing when his/her specific share of the quota is reached.” But it is a concept the huge majority of saltwater fishermen – recreational fishermen and small commercial fishing operations – have proven to be vehemently opposed to. continue reading the story here 08:12
South Atlantic Council, NOAA science gets ripped! Another crooked closure of red snapper
Many of you aren’t fishermen. But even if you don’t know a red snapper from gangsta rapper, this might still be worth a look. The South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council is as crooked and bloated a government bureaucracy as exists today. It perverts science. It feeds on special interests. More importantly, it squanders a natural resource. It announced this week the 2016 season for the American Red Snapper will be closed — as it was in 2015. During the three years prior, the season was open for a total of 12 days. It all began in 2008 when NOAA scientists determined that the red snapper stock in the South Atlantic was at just 3 percent of the biomass 50 years prior. That would have been 1958 when there was neither a NOAA, nor any other group counting red snapper. Perhaps 10 percent of all boats, recreational and commercial, could make the trip out 50 miles where the species thrives. There was no real sonar to find the hundreds of reefs where the fish spawned and no satellite positioning systems to find them again if you did hit a honey hole by accident or luck. So the “science” began as a fabrication, and that continues today. Read the op-ed here 07:45
