Great peice of research there. A little emotive at the end as really the facts speak for themselves really. But Sam Mossman is right in my view. Greedy commercials stuffed it and so greedy commercials should take the hit.
I had a visit on Thursday afternoon from a member of the investigation staff for the Ministry of Primary Industries. I spoke to him briefly regarding the proposed changes to the recreational catch limits in Snapper one.
According to their [MPI] research, which is quite considerable, with the increase in population of the Auckland area, plus the huge increase in the number of small boats, kayaks, tinnies etc, the recreational catch of snapper over the last few years is estimated to have gone up by a whopping 600%.
The reason for his visit was over something far more serious so I did not pursue the subject further. However, it was interesting to hear from someone who was directly involved in the research side or fisheries.
One other thing he did mention, none of the professionals working out of Napier have a quota for snapper, so they actually take measures not to catch them. Because of this any snapper they do catch cannot be landed, in fact they would be penalised should they do so.
After reading the snapper 1 proposal I don't think there research was very robust at all. And you take that from someone who taught research at a tertiary institution for 5 years.
But thanks for helping with our argument Hangler. What do these so called experts do when they do catch snapper then. Dump them to hide the evidence? Now thats professional.
That is what gets to me Rex is these guys are dumping and wasting fish that could be left alone to grow a bit more to keep our breeding stocks up to dump fish to hide the evidence is not only wasteful but in my eyes unethical and disrespectful of our waters. I am really glad to see such people as matt watson backing this whole thing and was impressed to see him say something about the SNA1 argument at the end of his show on saturday night, then last night he was on 7 sharp speaking out about this shark finning carry on. There is alot to be answered for with all of this stuff being bought to our attention. Even in sams article where it showed a picture of the bulldozer pushing tons and tons of wasted snapper into a hole a ta landfill made my heart really sink that all of this wastage and disrespect to our fisheries has been going on for 50 years or so. Big thumbs up to sam for writing that article and exposing the long history of this in the commercial fisheries.
Rex, I can't answer your question as to what the professional (commercial) fisherman do. However, in the next few months I will be having a lot to do with the Ministry of Primary Industries, this is the department who were charged with making a full investigating into the death of my wife from the Listeria outbreak in Hawke's Bay.
In this respect I can tell you their investigation has been more than thorough, in fact far more so than I would ever have imagined. This has lead to 153 charges against the Napier meat company that allowed infected meat onto the public arena.
There was a mention that the professional fishermen take measures to prevent snapper being caught, but I can't recall the nature of what these entail. I will be meeting with him again before long, and then I will try to find out how professional fisherman try to prevent snapper from being caught.
Who are the commercials that are fishing snapper in the Tahainui, Nuhaka area then? The snapper don't know where the car park is! Sometimes it is better to travel than to arrive.
on 3/9/2013, 8:59 am