Recently two incidents in Baldwin County beach have underscored the physical dangers commercial gill net fishermen and this has increased the pressure to ban the commercial gill net practices. The fishermen say they are facing as their livelihood is increasingly hedged in by mounting restrictions.
Maburn Rhodes, president emeritus of the Alabama Seafood Association, told that the commercial gill netters have to work in bad weather when they didn’t before as the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources took weekend fishing in the Gulf of Mexico away from commercial gill net fishermen. Due to increase accidents in the waters demand the closure of commercial gill net practices of fishing immediately.
And for this a bill was presented in March to completely ban commercial gill nets based on allegations of declines of fish populations along the Alabama coast. According to a report by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources commercial gill nets were depleting state waters and the depletion could not be remedied by other means. It said that the Advisory Board of Conservation and Natural Resources would prohibit the use of commercial gill nets.
Mobile attorney Edwin Lamberth, chairman of Coastal Conservation Association of Alabama’s Governmental Relations Committee, informed that CCA would not have been happy with last year’s bill had it run its legislative course. Alabama has set out another deadline of September 2008 to ban commercial gill nets.
Pete Barber of Theodore, president of the Alabama Seafood Association, told that the association and the commercial gill netters are “outgunned” as far as money and what he calls “access,” meaning the recreational fishermen’s ability to contact state legislators via e-mails with a single keystroke.
