A federal act imposing limits on fisheries along the East Coast has some fishermen up in arms.
Take Capt. Dave Tilley of the Continental Shelf in Morehead City, for example. Year-round for more than two decades, Tilley has loaded his 100-foot head boat with passengers and carted them off the coast of North Carolina to deep-sea fish.
But Tilley closed his doors for the first time in November, claiming that with beeliner and grouper fisheries shut down, there was no point in going out. "I have nothing else to catch," he said.
Tilley joined fishermen from Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach and thousands of others from around the country in a "United We Fish" rally outside the capitol in Washington D.C. this week, demanding that it overhaul its data gathering methods and loosen fishery limits.
They were protesting the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which aims to snip overfishing by mandating annual catch limits and accountability measures. But opponents of the act say it is using inaccurate data to limit and close fisheries that don't need to be. These limits, opponents say, are driving them out of business.