Tell President Obama its time to BAN pair trawling!!!

[LurkerCharters]

Hello everyone, I'm new to this forum and its a great board. I have been doing some research on the mid water pair trawling operations in our area and my findings are troubling to say the least. There is a grass roots movement already underway to put tighter controls on this fleet but it doesn't go far enough. I am trying to get as many people as possible to write letters to Mr. Change to try and make a real change that will benefit all fishermen in New England.
Pair trawling has been banned in Canada for over 30 years and its high time that we do the same, here's why. This fishing method is devastatingly efficient, I'm not going to go into the details of how it works but you should watch the "declining herring" video on youtube, there are some other videos that will come up if you search pair trawling that will educate you on how it works.
-NMFS encouraged the development of these boats and the feds put up the money for them to be built, this has nothing to do with fishing and everything to do with greed.
-the funding for the observer program for this fishery has been cut and now they are fishing unsupervised.
-No one knows what their true by catch figures are because even when there are observers on the boats they can dump the net without hauling on board and when they make a mistake on a tow it can be huge. Their bycatch has included juvenile groundfish, river herring, and GIANT TUNA!!! A boat was caught trying to sell giants illegally.
-whatever gets in their nets dies due to the enormous pressure and weight that can accumulate with small mesh size and huge net.
-When these boats find a school of herring they stay on it until there is nothing left.
-I think that their activity off the back side of the cape this fall(they went over their quota by 40% for that area and were not fined) is directly related to the absence of giants off Chatham this fall. As a result the giant fisherman were forced to make the run to George's, a risky endeavor to say the least.
-The companies who own these boats have lobbyists who can pay whoever is necessary to get regulations changed in their favor. Who is lobbying for all of the day boats who have been put out of business by these companies? No one.
-Foreign vessles already put the herring fishery into collapse in the 1970's. The EEZ was created and the stocks came back but now NMFS is going to let this happen again because now they have a financial stake in the fishery. NMFS cannot be trusted!!!
-We all know this is not a sustainable fishing practice and its time for the small boats to win. So what if these boats get repurposed and a small amount of people lose their jobs. They can get jobs on many more smaller boats that can reclaim their place in the fishery and in the end create even more jobs for the region.
-If we succeed it would be like closing a Walmart that is ruining our near coastal fisheries.
Sorry this post turned into a novel, but i think I made my case. Canada has the right idea when it comes to managing their fisheries, NMFS could learn alot from them. TRUE PATRIOTS DISSENT!!! Get active and make a difference.

[LurkerCharters]

I am surprised no one has anything to say about this. Maybe you don't think this is possible or you won't make a difference or maybe I'm the only one who cares. Remember this post when its five years from now and things are even worse. The presence of herring and other larger forage for the tuna is crucial for our fishery. The tuna won't come to an area if there is no food and I will say I told you so.

[jhbw]

I think that you are 100% right in everything you said. However, besides yelling and screaming about it , what can we do to out play their big lobbyist with all their money?

[LurkerCharters]

this is all we can do, make him aware that lobbyist's dirty money has no place in the fishing industry. if enough people write in, and he does read letters from citizens, he will at least have to acknowledge a problem he probably isn't even aware of. It can't hurt to try. What the pair trawlers are doing is the equivilant of someone going onto a farmers field at night and removing his top soil with a piece of equipment that the government gave him a loan to build. Its dirty fishing and it has to stop.