Well over 100 fishermen from the local community met at Billy the Kid’s to discuss the amendment proposals by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council regarding Wahoo, Mahi Mahi (Dolphin fish) and Cobia. The historic event brought together representatives from commercial, charter and recreational fishing to fight against what could deal a death blow to fisheries from North Carolina through Florida. They also discussed creating a unanimous counterproposal and coming together to oppose catch share programs.
The proposal is being fought by fishing communities throughout the Southeast.
“We’re trying to get organized, to get everyone together and decide what we are going to approach them with. Some things we can’t change but right now we are trying to find a way to keep fishing,” said Captain Keith Logan, who has been a major party in orchestrating the local meetings and a vocal opponent of catch share programs and the proposals by the council, especially the new ones.
“We have come to three main points. Number one is that fisheries managers have failed to weigh the social economic impacts that certain closures will have on our area. Number two is that the data used to calculate closures or ACLs are extremely flawed. The third is that our South Atlantic Fishermen stand firmly against any form of catch shares,” said Cameron Sebastian, another local fisherman who has been instrumental in fighting the new proposals. Logan stated that the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council had even admitted to having flawed data on which they based potential limits and closures.
Catch shares are being implemented through the National Marine Fisheries Service. The goal is to reduce the number of working watermen in the United States by more than 60 percent. A catch share is an exclusive guarantee that whoever holds the catch share has the exclusive right to harvest a certain percentage of the total allowable catch of a particular species of marine life.
It does not grant the right to catch a certain number of fish each year. How many fish can be caught is a number that National Marine Fisheries Service already determines. Catch shares can be bought, they can be sold, and they can be leased or traded.
Catch shares policy, the men believe, is about taking the right to fish away from the masses, from those individuals who want to become fishermen for a lifetime or for a day, and giving that right to harvest fish to a select few and are designed to privatize the ocean.
“The Pew Charitable trust fund has $53 million in a trust right now. If we go to catch shares, who is going to buy them? They will. Then who is going to be fishing? Nobody. We’re all little guys in this room and we’re all going to be sitting at the docks,” said Logan.
“It hasn’t worked in Australia, New Zealand or in the Gulf of Mexico. They’re doing it in the New England states and it isn’t working there. The fluke fishery guys are sitting at the docks. In the Gulf, they had 523 in charter commercial boats and only 221 are going out,” said Logan.
“We need to educate the non-fishing public. They think we’re just out here slaughtering fish and that isn’t what this is about. We’re trying to make a living and we’re trying to keep fishing,” Logan continued, citing the Alaskan crab fisheries that left 200 boats to dwindle down to approximately 15.
Read the complete story in the North Myrtle Beach Times