In Reply to: Re: so it's going fishing again? great. posted by Elaine on January 08, 2008 at 03:33:51:

Gill nets, bottom trawling, and long lining should be banned throughout the state of California. These fishing methods are proven to be the most destructive with the most bycatch. All the fishermen I know up here in Norcal have given up these practices and have gone to more sustainable small scale fishing like salmon, albacore, black cod, and crab. These are much cleaner and small scale fisheries.
There needs to be a movement to get legislation to begin the ball rolling on an outright ban on net fishing in California.

The owners of that derelict net you guys found should have to pay $10,000.00 for each dead sea lion, seal, bird and $100 for every other non targeted species other than mammals.

One way to bring net fishing to a halt would be not to necessarily ban it right away but to implement such stringent rules and fines that it would become not worth the hassle for fishermen to use these methods. Once a boat gives up a license then the permit cannot be reinstated, or if a vessel gets sold then that would be the end of that permit, and if a particular fisherman has a certain number of offenses then that would be grounds to revoke their permit. After a few years the gillnet permits would dwindle and then an outright ban could be proposed and there wouldn't be enough gillnet fishery lobby to stand against it.

Then we win ;-)

We could start now by collecting signatures.

• Re: Gill nets should be banned Already banned 00:14:56 01/16/08 (0)