I feel your pain! Traditionally, I've enjoyed a 6-month season for halibut, with 2 per client (any size) for a daily bag limit. Last year we were cut to 1 of any size, and if a client took a second fish, it had to be less than 32". This year, we're about to get slapped with a 1-fish bag limit and possibly a 4 fish annual limit. These regulations are in addition to our existing rules prohibiting Captain & Crew from retaining fish, and prohibiting any sport boat from fishing more than 6 lines (no head boats here at all... just us 6-packs!)
To the casual observer, it might appear that halibut (or red snapper, in your case) are in danger of overfishing, but this is just not true. Here in Alaska, the halibut stocks are at their healthiest levels in 50 years, the regular trends are showing true, and the commercial price for the fish is through the roof! Oh, but a few hundred commercial fishing boats that work 1000 miles from me wanted a few more fish, so NMFS and the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council saw fit to re-allocate a few million pounds to another area.
I'm thinking that little code snippet that was written for the SC trailering issue ought to be developed a bit more to incorporate an administrative back-end for each region's issues... it would make it a lot easier for all of us sportsmen to support each other when it came time to writing letters to the "powers that be"...
We, too, will keep on fishing... pun intended: there are other fish in the sea. It's just that in my case the next best thing to Pacific Halibut is Sablefish... deep-drop fishing to 2000' anyone? ;-)
-Case
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