We had a meeting with the Author before his first report. The draft was almost finished but I spent 4 or 5 hours reviewing and commenting on that. Seems the message has not changed.

Recraetional fishers need quota the same as commerial.

Report ALL their catch... somehow??

Buy quota off commecial (at what ever inflated price they come up with) if we want to increase our share in our fishery.

Find millions of dollars a year to run the whole Cluster @#^%.  $20 a head wont cut it.

 

Western Australia

 

1) I use circles almost exclusively these days and yes that is a realistic idea for bait fisherman but not sure about the 99%+. Maybe 90%+ would be unhooked reasonably easily but you still do get the occasional fish that is hooked a bit deeper when you have inexperienced fisherman on board. Still a good thing though. For softbait and lure fisherman of all types I don't think this is maybe a realistic option.

2) This could be done, but the definition of barotrauma and how that is published to the public would need work.Enforcement is almost impossible though so not sure how this would work as a 'law' rather than just an educational effort.

3) Because 2 is unenforceable I can't really see this working. Most people aren't going to stop their days fishing because the 6 people on the caught 3 small baro fish on the first drop of the day when they have just motored an hour to get to their spot etc. No use trying to make laws that virtually everyone will ignore because they are too restrictive.

4) Something like this is going to happen sooner or later. Our current free for all on boating safety will not last as we keep on growing the population and crowding the water. I hate it and hate the way we are growing the population to wreck/crowd our natural resources, but a course like you describe will happen sooner or later due to safety issues. Thing them is to get the fishing put into the course.

5) I am tired of hearing how the recreational catch has to be accurately measured and this is the ongoing excuse for poor fisheries management. The more we support this argument the more we play into the hands of the commercial sectors constant attempts to deflect attention from the damage they do. What we should focus on is how 'satisfying' the fishing experience is for the rec anglers. The current ramp surveys and over flight counts get this accurately enough to build the picture and don't rely on compliance by anglers and introduce yet another way that someone can be prosecuted for going about their daily lives. If the phone in thing is going to work you would have to have enforcement. That means everyone having to report before they get back to the ramp/berth and then get some sort of report number to confirm they have reported and then have people at the ramps/marinas checking for those numbers. Just imagine how may people would need to be manning the phones on a nice Saturday afternoon. Would need to be 100's of them. Then we would need to pay to report to fund all this and then people won't do it etc etc. So maybe you have a phone app report instead but then we are making it compulsory for everyone who fishes to carry a phone that supports that app plus who knows how many people on a help desk to deal with technical problems. I just don't think this is realistic, necessary, nor affordable. Lets not lose sight of the goal - rec fisherman have an enjoyable day on the water and catch a few reasonable sized fish to take home without having to be an expert fisherman to catch them. All the talk about needing a more accurate understanding of the rec catch is a mix of scientists who think they need to have 100% data before they can make a reasonable study and the Comms who are desperately trying to throw blame on the rec sector for the damage they have dohe and are still doing.

This all comes back to our QMS. What we should be doing is prioritising that for the very few fisheries (around 5% or less) that the recs make any impact on we look first at providing a reasonable fishing experience to the average angler. That's around 1,000,000 people served. After that we make allowance for the comms and that is maybe a few 100 people served. It isn't hard to work out how a sensible non-corrupt first world country should be prioritising the allocation of its 'publicly owned' natural resources.

I would love to see a proper audit done so that the people of NZ could truly see how little they get from the commercial rape of our inshore fisheries. I am guessing that the actual true return to the public might be only a $1 or 2 person and for that we have almost destroyed our inshore fisheries by commercial over exploitation. 

We get told that these fisheries generate important export dollars. I would love to see a properly audited balance sheet of how much this really is for the shared  inshore fisheries by the time they account for all the overseas purchases (boats, fuel, fishing gear, engines and parts, electronics etc) plus the profits shipped offshore. I would imagine that those numbers might make quite poor reading compared to what the comm sector like to publish. If only the average kiwi could see them and realise that our most popular recreational activity has been wrecked to make a very small number pf people wealthy and return comparatively little  value to the public of NZ.

I don't know if the QMS is legally fixable but from what I have read it is the biggest 'theft' of public property in the history of our country. $billions of quota and cash given for free to a select group of people in a grossly miss-manged process. There are people today that make a serious income from sitting in their armchairs and leasing out quota they received because they happened to be catching fish for a few years around the time quota was issued 35 years ago. Why isn't that income going to the people of NZ?  How do the public benefit from handing over that quota in the first place?The only way to minimise the effect of that is to get the shared fisheries prioritised to rec fishing but that won't happen unless one of our governments eventually sees that it is a make or break election issue. Our own legislation has been proven in court to pretty much hand the final decision making to the comm sector until a fishery is virtually fully collapsed. Given our typical Kiwi apathy I can't see that happening until our shared fisheries are totally screwed for rec angling and then it will be too late