“I mean, how can we make a living for our families and every year they’re taking something from us? But yet the tax man’s sittin’ there holding his hands out,” Ricky Rambeaut said.
Rambeaut says regulators first put a size limit on the fish, but didn’t allow time to see results. Now, he’s upset about other regulations working their way through the fishery councils that could possibly ban red snapper fishing for up to a year and put major restrictions, including a temporary moratorium, on the other nine remaining species in the snapper-grouper complex (gag, vermilion, red grouper, black grouper, snowy grouper, Warsaw grouper, black sea bass, speckled hind and golden tilefish).
To fishermen, even those who agree with the need for restrictions, this means months of hardship are ahead. To scientists working on the amendments, it means taking some hardship off the fish for long-term benefits of fishermen.
“I think a lot of times the fishermen get upset … because they see the scientists go and sample at locations that don’t make any sense. And the fishermen want to say, ‘Well, I can show you where the fish are. If you’re looking for fish, you’re looking in the wrong spot,’ ” said Sera Drevenak, policy analyst at the Pew Environmental Group, which supports the Snapper-Grouper Amendments. “But the fishery independent data has to be random and stratified. … They’re just trying to get, over a series of years, an ‘index of abundance,’ they call it.”
Some fishermen still don’t buy it. And that’s led David Heil, chairman of the South Atlantic Chapter of the Fishing Rights Alliance, to file a lawsuit challenging Amendment 16. If Amendments 17A and 17B pass, he said, he’ll file suit challenging those, too.
“They want to shut everything down. I’m not for any of it,” said Robbie Wolfe, who runs the Whipsaw charter boat out of Wrightsville Beach. “They always use that overfishing stuff because the fishermen don’t have a strong lobby.”