The Wild Side for Nov. 8

• By JOE MACALUSO
• Advocate Outdoors writer
• Published: Nov 8, 2009

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Thursday marked a victory for Louisiana recreational fishermen, a hollow victory.

True, the Wildlife and Fisheries Commission rejected three items that would have brought the state in line with fisheries management schemes in federal waters.

Other than telling the federal government that we won’t join in their plots to severely restrict recreational catches in the Gulf of Mexico, the three items covered species only rarely, if ever, found in state waters, species like greater amberjack, red snapper and grouper.

With federal regulations in place — notably the closure of the recreational greater amberjack season late last month — Louisiana’s recreational fleet won’t be able to keep any of those species in federal waters. And federal waters begin three miles off the Louisiana coast.

See now, it’s not illegal to have greater amberjack or certain grouper species on your boat in state waters.

Certainly the biggest news is that the commission rejected the move to make federal regulations our state regulations.

Charterboat skipper Daryl Carpenter told the commission Thursday that rejecting the federal rules, “in essence will not do anything for me or other charterboats. It will not put another fish on our boats.”

What Carpenter, a handful of other charterboat captains and several Coastal Conservation Association members told the commission they wanted to see was Louisiana call a halt to the rubber stamp the commission applied to federal regulations every time these matters came up during the past 20 years.

Carpenter cited the recent amberjack closure as proof the National Marine Fisheries Service cares little for the recreational fishermen: “We got a five-day notice on the closure,” he said. “Some of us had trips booked, and it’s not likely any of us are going to read the Federal Registry every day to find out that something like this was posted. What they did was take another fish off our menu.”

Though the LWFC’s action means little more than “sending a message,” it’s another spoke in a wheel that’s gaining speed across the nation.

CCA is in a group of 12 conservation organizations demanding NMFS follow Congressional instructions and come up with more specific scientific and statistical models for determining fish populations and quotas for fishermen.

And, last Wednesday, the Recreational Fishing Alliance headed a group filing a legal brief in the U.S. District Court in New Jersey to challenge NMFS’s closure of the recreational black seabass season in the Atlantic Ocean, because the closure, the brief stated, was because of “misapplication and misuse of a fatally flawed angler survey, which NMFS itself has acknowledged is not to be used for this type of decision.”

Maybe Louisiana’s federal district courts will get a look at something like that brief soon. Let’s hope so.