Sashamy, you got it right Doug. The only reason those proposed rule changes made it that far is because of the work by Rich and ABTA.

For the record, ABTA Director Steve Weiner and Executive Director Rich Ruais met with Senator Kerry's office about CITES only a couple of hours before the Gloucester hearing. Then yesterday, the three of us were in Washington again with High level Fish and Wildlife and Noaa people about the Cites issue.

The rule proposed changes are important and are now almost over a year in the making, 3 meetings, 3 written comments, hopefully NMFS will act.

CITES is the hot button and almost dominates 100 percent of our time. 18 ABTA Fishermen and 2 ABTA Executive Committee Directors attended the Cites hearing in Washington about 3 weeks ago.

Any member wondering what ABTA is doing or has done, only needs to look at our web under current actions. We have been to the senate twice, and worked to get a senate resolution that provided direction and senate support for our ICCAT delegation this past November. We have worked to elevate the needs of this fishery to the highest levels we can and because of this, our NMFS delegation to ICCAT actually supported US fishermen for the first time that I recall...they defended US fishermen against quota reduction when called for by some rouge Eastern nations in an effort to redirect the heat.

We truly have an up hill battle on the CITIES issue and fishermen should be concerned.


Ralph Pratt ABTA Director and
NMFS HMS Advisory panel member