Monday, March 15, 2010

One last day before the storm






We didn't think we would make it out on Thursday as the weather report was calling for some high wind and seas. The front ended up coming in later than forecast, so we ended up making it out on the water for another day of fishing. The day turned out to be beautiful - sunny and warm with small seas. The bite was never wide open, but we had three double headers throughout the day. We ended up with 7 fish archival tagged by the time we pulled in lines at the end of the day. We were sad that it was the last day Heather was going to be fishing with us before heading back to California. Right now the team is dispersed as we wait out the high winds for the next few days. It looks like Thursday and Friday might be fishable again. Hopefully the fish will be right where we left them and we can continue the tagging where we left off. Stay tuned...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How many days will you guys tag off the NC coast? is there still time to donate for a tag?

The news today sucked. International commissions fail us, and the tuna.

Will we be able to tag the remaining bluefin before Japan kills them all?

Anonymous said...

I'm probably in the minority on this board with my views, but I actually think that CITES being shot down is a positive thing. Japan wasn't going to abide so the demand was still going to be there and there are many tuna fishing nations that would have continued exploiting the resource to meet that demand. The only difference would be that those nations would be fishing without any oversight. Even if ICCAT has been a disaster it is better than nothing.

The only people we would have hurt is our own local fishermen, who you may be surprised have been leading the charge to help these fish. The local fishermen have abided by all of the scientific recommendations for appropriate quotas, have been pushing ICCAT for years to reduce the size of the eastern atlantic quota and have actively assisted in the tagging of these fish. They are also pushing for better management of the tuna's bait species off our coast, which have been devastated by massive factory ships for years. I know commercial tuna fishermen and environmental groups would be odd bed fellows, but you both have the same goal (healthy fish stocks) and I personally believe that you would be a lot more powerful in accomplishing those goals united than fighting each other. My 2 cents.