My wife and I both grew up NC coastal. We started dating while attending East Carteret High School. New Bern was considered upstate, and neither one of us went to the State Fair until after we were married.
My grandfather and father ran a fish house on Adams Creek in Craven County when I was a toddler. They sold soft shell crabs and shrimp to restaurants like the Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City. So as a teen, it was only natural that I was conscripted by my dad as the reluctant mate for his various commercial shrimping enterprises.
You haven’t lived until you experience standing on the after deck of a small trawler, shaking the catch down into the net, flipping fragments of jelly fish stinging nettles on your face and in your eyes, 1,000 degrees in the blazing mid-morning sun, with not slightest breeze
anywhere in sight!
Despite experiencing this sadistic trawling trauma, or maybe because of it, after college, I spent two years learning how to build shrimp trawls and other nets from Levi Beveridge at Carteret Technical College. Later, I went on to patent a turtle excluder device for shrimp trawls, but this was nixed by the National Marine Fisheries Service, who withheld approval, but that is another story maybe for another time.
We have several family and friends who use small shrimp trawls to fill their freezers under the Recreational Commercial Gear License. How the proposed ban will affect recreational shrimp trawling hasn’t entered into the public discussion at this point; however, it falls under the proposed ban also.
Presently, I have a 25′ net; trawl doors; tickler chain; tow ropes; two byrds (installed); and a little, cute pink regulatory float tied to the tail bag, in my shop, that has never been in the water. Maybe it won’t be headed to the landfill. Needless to say, no one I know, who fishes
recreationally here at the coast, is happy with how this ban is being crammed down our throats.
To add insult to injury, this past Sunday afternoon, at about 3 pm, my wife, who recently renewed her coastal fishing license, received an email message from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (WRC). The message explained why one should support the ban on shrimp trawling in inside coastal North Carolina waters and invited her to contact her legislators to support the ban. The email was received like soaking a fresh wound in a gallon of alcohol.
In sending this email, we see a state agency using state resources to push a blatantly political position. This action begs the question as to whether or not this shrimp trawling ban is being quietly pushed from within the state resource agencies.
Blowing the impacts of shrimp trawling totally out of proportion is a typical environmentalist tactic. I have questioned for some time whether North Carolina environmental resource agencies are simply the extension of radical environmental groups.
Government-paid environmental advocates without any private-sector experience are a threat to the state’s industrial sector. They tilt the policy balance away from what benefits the people and onto what benefits other creatures and inanimate objects. Environmental advocates are typically uncompromising and pursue an anti-people philosophy.
For example, numerous high-level officials have left state government and gone to work for the NC Coastal Federation. The present secretary of the Division of Environmental Quality comes from an environmental advocacy background, in addition to at least one of his assistants. How many state environmental policy and regulatory permit decisions are made
with an eye towards securing a future prestigious position with an environmentalist NGO?
However, in this particular matter, the person with the WRC who sent out the email message should be immediately dismissed. Using the coastal licensee mailing list to directly propagandize the hook-and-line fishing public about the supposed evils of shrimp trawling is a blatantly political act. This is an obvious “thumb on the scales” attempt by state government to tilt this debate in the direction of the anti-trawling proponents. Exactly what jurisdiction does the WRC have over shrimp trawling anyhow?
Seems like the environmental impacts associated with any human activity are directly proportional to how much they are studied. And what gets studied is what the government funds. If the government is trying to force a certain outcome, as has been demonstrated by this WRC email, all of the studies mentioned should be brought into question as being either
invalid or incomplete, due to a question of motive.
This WRC email demonstrates the state environmental resource agencies are partial and biased and may have spent years setting everything up for this very push. The WRC should have stayed out of the debate because now the studies mentioned have lost all credibility. After all, tobacco companies have studies saying cigarette smoking is actually good for
you.
State environmental resource agencies should be protecting the environment FOR the people, not FROM the people. Them wandering into this political debate with the government hard sell, smacks of the government lies we were all told during COVID. This should be the red-flag warning that this proposed ban is all just a setup to unnecessarily destroy this vital fishing industry and deep-seated shrimping traditions coastal families have enjoyed for generations!