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Random Quote: never argue with idiots, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience
it was a good meeting some good points talked about but it was the same 20-30 people that always go few from maine few from cape talked about the med ,dogs and small tuna sounds like things might get better down the road
Anybody know how that tuna meeting went today? What was discussed? what was favorably viewed?
As lucky said, it went well...good turnout, albeit (as lucky pointed out) was the same group of guys that go to all the meetings. Focus was on ICCAT, although the issues of forage and dogfish were disucssed as well. I do not have time to get into details now, will try and give better summary tomorrow. BUT, one thing that is becioming increasingly evdient is that we are ALL going to have to fight together over the next few years to keep our ICCAT quota. There are A LOT of raidcal enviros that want to further restrict US fishermen and lots of nations trying to take our quota.
Cannot overstate the importance of this fight. If you like fishing for bluefin- whether that be recreationally or commercially, with a rod or with a harpoon- than you HAVE to get involved more. This is not a drill- we have a battle ahead of us. The key issue is getting the people at NOAA to stick up for the US fleet, which has taken cut after cut, and is the most restricted in the world. It is NOT acceptable to continue to screw US fishermen when we always follow the science and the rules in general. The time is coming when all of us have to be active. I will keep you all posted on how you can help. NO EXCUSE for not getting involved, guys, seriously. Stay tuned for more in near future.
I was especially curious about the possibility of dropping the the size limit down to 65"s. From what I have heard nmfs has not been to receptive of the idea.
Please tell me how we are supposed to know about a meeting that is set up through personal communication between a fisherman and the acting director of NMFS. I found out a day before by reading a comment in the middle of an unrelated thread on this website. I PMed someone participating in that thread and he didn't know about it - and didn't care. I PMed you, Chris, on the other website, but you didn't respond. A posting was made on the other site 3 hours and 47 minutes before this supposed meeting was to take place. I just wanted to know if it was a public meeting or private, and confirm the location. I would very much like a lot more people, including myself, to attend and participate in these "meetings". I don't want the fishery I'm invested in to be run according to suggestions from a select few advocates that communicate among themselves and have, somehow, a direct line to the acting NMFS director. There are definitely issues about industry representation to be addressed, but at the very least, until there is a better system of communicating the occurance of meetings I'll consider your admonition pure BS.
most of the people there belong to a group like east coast tuna ,north shore tuna ass, and general category ass we all got email i tried to get it out it was on at least 3 of these sites but if you look most didn't get much attention there will be more coming will get it on ASAP we need to fight it as one group to get anywhere i talk to a lot of people who said they be there and no showed just like always yea yea ill be there it sucks when you see same people and almost everone knows each other and the gov people to i hope more get involved
I agree, it would have been nice if it had been better publicized, but I guarentee you it was not intentionally. But A LOT of people did know about it and so there should have been more than 30 peple there. This was an important meeting to get our managers to help the US fishery. Everyone wants to have more people at meetings. These meetings with NMFS people are to push them to fight for all fishermen here and it has nothing to do with trying to fight about domestic issues. The woman there is the woman who will be representing all US fishermen at ICCAT and so the point was to show her that she needs to go to ICCAT and tell the EU and Libya to cut the $hit.
But even more importantly is to show her that she needs to be sticking up for us and not allowing people within the US to try and push us to stop fishing. She is the person who all fishermen here are going to be counting on to stick up for us. There are a lot of people that are continually trying to stop all bluefin fishing in this country and this year is going to be critical because on top of the enviros here you have Mexico, Trinidad and a dozen other nations activly fighting to take our quota.
So, it would have been ideal for EVERYONE to have as many people tehre as possible.But dont worry, you will have PLENTY of chances to get involved and help fight in the cpoming year. If we are not lucky, we will lose our US quota (which means everyone here in the US loses quota) than we will be screwed.
Leave the infighting stuff at the door, though. There was no discussion of things like seining or quota allocations for one sector versus another or anything of that nature. These kinds of issues are not important right now because between the dogfish and forage problems, and the people trying to kill our fishery, we have to fight just to survive. Hopefully we can weather the storm over the next year or two and regain our fishery to the point when we will again have the luxury of wasting time on things within the fishery as opposed to fighting to keep our fishery!
I will keep everyone posted on meetings and will post some stuff tomorrow you can do to help with iCCAT in the next day or two.
and by the way, taylor, i did not know u pm'd me on theother site until i read your post here last night....i dont check pms very often and so if u wanna reach me, try emailing or calling instead of pm'ing the day before a meeting. i bend over backwards to try and notify people about things all the friggin time and most never bother doing anything to help.
dont try and complain to me when u are not informed, that info about the meeting was on reel time, multiple forums, for days. and it sounds like a lot of people were emailed about it too. i had herring $hit going on all week and found out about his meeting online on a message board and so u should have been able to as well. would u even have gone? i woukd hope so when u come on here and complain like that! dont ssend a pm the day before and expect to have that be very effective. get involved a little more and maybe u wont be so out of the loop. dont try and blame others for your being out of the loop.
and also, there were at least thirty guys there from all parts of the fishery, so dont give me that 'select few' crap.
My comments (not so much complaints) were meant to illustrate the means by which myself and some others (and apparently yourself) are currently finding out about meetings and other issues about the fishery. It is like most other fisheries where the industry is not represented by a single cohesive unit with an organizational administrative head that sends out the appropriate mailings - that is obviously idealistic. It still remains inefficient and ineffective. Although I was not aware of the other organizations that luckytuna mentioned, I did contribute to East Coast Tuna until my mailings were returned, which I thought indicated that the organization had folded due to funding issues, as had been raised. How to advertise meetings and plan for industry participation, from what I gather from this discussion, is still a problem. The question still remains: how can we better inform all industry members to get higher attendance and greater participation - from not necessarily the "same" [luckytuna] members of the various stakeholder groups - and avoid being reprimanded for "not getting involved". I'll work harder on my end to learn about these organizations so that I can be regularly updated and try to think of ways to facilitate this for others.
As for your comments, I continue to find them confusing, accusing, and inflammatory. And this is concerning considering you appear to be a vocal and potentially influential industry representative. I don't consider questioning your view to be industry "infighting". That suggestion is outdated and irrelevant. I was not relying on you exclusively to inform me about the meeting in question nor am I blaming you for not doing so - although, one could make that argument, if he so wished, from "I will keep you all posted on how you can help. NO EXCUSE for not getting involved, guys, seriously. Stay tuned for more in near future." I do think a cohesive, if not singular, focused, and professional voice (as ideally facilitated by well attended meetings) is needed to address the issues facing the US tuna industry. But I'm not sure that I want it to be yours. So, again, I'll try harder.
there was a north east charter boat had a meeting the night before and they did'nt say much to there members but there was at least three of them there and i told a few members about the meeting and they did'nt show up and i am not a member of that group alot of guys there are not in the groups or the email list but showed up from talking to there friends i will try to post sooner if i can
You guys are fighting amongst yourself now...not good....I was told about the meeting and I was the guys who didn't care
Yup I am tired of caring, tuna is a drop ion a bucket compared to groundfish and look how much they care about that...
I used to go to every meeting whether it was an airplane issue or quota or just status quo, I was there and everything we
ever asked for never happened, the US gets pushed around in ICCAT and we are losing fish to the med, and really the go
ernment does not care...they could put economic pressure on those countries to make them comply, but they don't
honestly we haven't caught the quota since what 2003 or 2002, I want to be able to keep and sell smaller fish!
Bt for some reason we have some arbitrary size of 73" why not 68" cananda, Japan, Morroco, Italy Spain, Austrailia(different fish) all can....why don't we fight for that? Take pressure off the bigger fish, create a medium category again...fish for what is available...ect
Currently I do not have a boat big enough to play with tuna of any size, I have to depend on 2 members of the THT to take me out, but I will, (working on the bigger boat issue.) So what will be the future of this fishery, quota or no quota? It seems that all I can hope for there is still a future.
It's not my intention for my banter to be interpreted as fighting, but instead try to determine how we can make the process more inclusive, not devisive. If we begin to consider issues like adjusting size limits, additional to what's already on the plate, we need broader and more effective communication - both within the fishery and between industry/fishery and management.
Thanks lucky and loligo for the info and links. I managed to find an e-mail address for Rich Ruais/East Coast Tuna Association and learned about the new website, tunanews.org. It addresses issues for bluefin tuna as well as others, yellowfin, bigeye, etc. It may be old news on this site, but if it isn't, perhaps a thread could be started to announce its existence. I look forward to learning more from Rich about how the site is being advertised.
I guess if I could go harpoon or troll a 68 inch fish everyday, I would don't get me wrong I love 500#ers, but in this day and age smaller fish are easier to come by, thus a paycheck, thus taking pressure off of the bigger fish....maybe I worded it wrong but somethng is better than nothing everyday? right???/
meeting today 
