SOUTH ATLANTIC FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL

PUBLIC COMMENT SESSION

RADISSON RESORT AT THE PORT CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA

APRIL 16, 2013

MR. LUDWIG: My name is Joe Ludwig; I own a business called Sea Dancer, Incorporated, which used to have a 35-foot longline vessel called the Sea Dancer. I have since sold that boat and downsized, hoping that sandbar sharks would remain open because that was my primary fishery in the past. I rigged a smaller boat called the Sea Dancer, Too, with a small longline reel, hoping that I could continue to fish for sandbars on a single-handed basis. Well, since I’ve done that and during that time I was building that boat, sandbars were completely taken away except by research fishery only, which I’ve applied for twice but opted out. I have limitedly participated in the tile fishery. Because I have a smaller boat, I can no longer effectively participate in January and February at the time that tilefish are open due to the sea conditions in the Gulf Stream at that time of the year off of Port Canaveral and Ponce Inlet, which used to be my home port. I found myself fishing on a larger vessel as a crew member and parking my boat, which I made available to former crew members at the time that the weather might permit them to go fishing. I think they got out three or four times this whole season.

The reason why I’m opposed to VMS is I think our operating costs between safety equipment and complying with the fishing vessel safety examinations, the cost of all the safety equipment, the EPIRB battery replacements, continually having to every year spend $500 to have a life raft recertified, the costs of the 20 to 50 mile flare kits, because I do occasionally go there; this is just an additional cost that I feel is unnecessary. I got a kick out of the name of one of your VMS units called the Watch Dog. Personally I find it insulting, having never had a fishing infraction in my – well, I have owned a boat since 1995, and never had a fishing infraction nor a citation from the Coast Guard for being inadequate in safety equipment. I find it personally insulting that I need a watch dog.

MR. HARTIG: Obviously, you’re not in favor of VMS.

MR. LUDWIG: No, I think it is just another cost and hoop we need to jump through to stay in the fishery that we’re so limited to most of the year. Now, if you were to reopen red snapper, that might change things.

MR. KAY: My name is Gordon Kay. I already stated this earlier at the meeting, but I just suggested the possibility of possibly not having everybody having a VMS system on their boat, possibly a limited number, like the highliners of the fleet, the guys that show higher catches; because supposedly they should be able to afford the system better so there is the economic factor covered, plus it is supposedly to gain information. The guys that fish 300 days a year and produce a larger amount of fish, it would lead to substantially more information being gathered from having the units on their boats. It seems like there is a dedicated amount of money

1 involved, so possibly putting them on just a limited number of boats there might be feasible to have no cost at all to the boat operators. It wouldn’t be an economic consideration for the fishermen instead of having one more thing to have to pay for, even if you did have a bigger operation. Like I say, you would also gather substantially more information from the guys that put more days at sea in and catch more fish. Thank you.

MR. TNEUTZEN: My name is Dave Tneutzen. I’ve got Snapper Grouper Permit Number 67 of the 225 limited. The first thing I would like to say is I am not a criminal. I’ve fished in Florida for 60 years and I’ve never had a violation of any kind. I resent the government assuming that I am, which is what I believe this VMS is. It is an assumption on the part of the government that fishermen are criminals and we have to enforce the law. I think that is really poor on the part of the government and the part of this council. I recently sent a letter to both Senator Nelson and Marco Rubio, and I would like to read that letter to you. I also sent it to Mr. Mahood, I believe. This is what I had to say: “Dear Senators; I know you have been actively involved with fishing issues on a federal level since they have significant ramifications for Florida and its citizens. I am retired and a part-time commercial fisherman. I have commercially fished for over 30 years. Complying with the enormous number of federal regulations has become almost impossible. It seems like every day I get another bulletin from the National Marine Fisheries Service announcing a closure, a modification to a rule, or a proposal for a rule.

“Recently the agency has proposed two rules that have me completely upset. The first is to place video cameras on select boats so that all fishing activities can be monitored by someone onshore. The second is to place vessel monitoring systems on all vessels in the snapper grouper fishery, so that we can be monitored 24/7. The reason given for wanting all the surveillance of the fishermen is basically that they have created so many rules that they need continuous monitoring to ensure compliance. This is our government run amuck. First a bureaucracy is created to make rules and regulations. As the bureaucracy grows, they make incredible complex rules on a continuing basis. Eventually expanding an organization determines the only way to ensure compliance is to monitor all its citizens 24 hours a day. George Orwell would be proud. Even more amazing is that in order to get this accepted by the fishermen, the National Marine Fisheries Service says it has enough money to give all 800 – and I didn’t know it was only 500 – as much as $3,100.00 buy the big brother unit.

That is $1.5 million dollars expenditure. Aren’t we $16 trillion in debt? Unbelievable! Beyond that, I will have to pay $500 to have it installed and it will cost me at least $30 and it looks more like $50 a month to operate it. No mention has been made of what the cost will be for the government employees who will run and monitor the program. I guess it is not going to cost anything – that’s just what I heard.

“One proposal is to take a percentage of the payments of what we catch to defray the government cost. I guess that is not going to happen, since we are on a different coast. This is a hidden tax no matter what they call it. Profits in the fishery aren’t great, and I wonder what the salaries of the NOAA employees watching me will be, compared to mine. A secondary benefit to them, as they admit, is that they will acquire all my fishing locations that I’ve spent 30 years finding. For fishermen, good locations and knowledge of fish habits are the competitive advantage. The government would now steal that and, of course, it will be public record for others to access, although I have been assured I guess now that is not going to happen.

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This is just a start. In meeting agenda notes, it was stated that they were considering adding charter and headboats to the program, but they weren’t going to consider sport fishermen at this time. This is a slippery slope that sets an example for government regulators in many other areas of our lives. Will we all have to wear a GPS collar in the foreseeable future? The required public hearings haven’t been announced, but I am told that they will be held within the next three weeks. If this regulation is implemented, I will give up my permit; stop fishing for snapper and grouper. As more commercial fishermen are forced to give up fishing, I predict a day in the not too distant future when there will be more federal employees monitoring fishing than there are fishermen. Do you think the agency will reduce the staff accordingly when that happens? Senator, I would ask you to look into this travesty and tell this agency to stop this insanity. It is too expensive, it creates no value, and it intrudes on my rights of freedom as an American. I look forward to hearing from you.”

Beyond that, a few other comments that I have – and we’ve heard these before -- the economics don’t make sense. If you are a 225 limited, you are not going to be able to catch a lot of fish. You’re limited on days. The particular port I fish out of is really getting tougher and tougher to catch any bottom fish. Fuel is eating us up and the profits are really small. One of the things that concerned me a lot was in the webinar that you had a week ago or two weeks ago, there was quite a bit of discussion concerning we’ve got to get this done because if we don’t, some other council is going to get the money. To me that just struck me; that was an underlying tone of the presentation.

That struck me as being this is about money, this is about getting a bigger budget, this is about putting more people on the payroll and that type of thing and not really looking at what the cost is going to be to the fishermen and what this is going to cost to the industry. As far as the safety concerns, I don’t ever fish out of cell phone range, but if I’ve got a problem I am not going to be relying on a ping every 15 minutes. I’m going to be relying on my cell phone, my VHS or my EPIRB. I don’t think there is much value added. You may have one example or something like that, but I’ll guarantee you that if there are a lot of safety issues going on they are not using VMSs to get them out of trouble.

Now one of the things, too, is I have a lot of friends that fish out of Key West and they have these machines on their boats, and I’ve fished on those boats. I think some of them may have even called you, Ben. Some of the problems that they have is these things run the batteries down all the time. One of my friends has had to tow two of his buddies in, because they were out fishing and the batteries run the things down and you can’t obviously start your motors. Other times they have to run their motors continuously all day long, which eats up their profits because they have to keep these things running. They are pretty much a drain on the battery.

Some of the other things I see are that when we come in after five o’clock from fishing, we park the boat at the dock. We can’t unload the boat. We have to wait until the next day to get permission to unload it, and it can be nine or ten o’clock in the morning before you get permission to actually unload the boat and then you take it to the fish house. Then when you go to the fish house, the fish house has to call in. It is a crazy amount of extra work you have to do, and it really impacts you if you fish off hours, if you don’t fish the nine to five and get there when you need to. That to me strikes me as just crazy. Of course, if the machine goes down, you can’t go fishing so that is another problem.

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On the east coast here, I guess there are certain places like maybe here in Port Canaveral, there are a lot of boats that come in and out and you could have one dock; but all up and down the east coast you have got all these small individuals. I’ve launched my boat from a private dock and keep it at my house. I don’t know how this would work – I can’t leave my boat in the water. I have to take my boat out when I come in. I can’t leave it until the next day to get permission to unload my catch or to unload my boat. I think there are some real considerations there seems to be about the logistics of this thing when you actually decide you’re going to do it as opposed to just this looks like a good idea for law enforcement. Anyway, I think your public notice was very poorly done. I only found out about this because I talked to Amber about another issue. I asked her about it and she told me about it. I know you sent out this little yellow bulletin that did say the meeting dates, and that was sent out about a week ago. It gave people a lot of time. I know I have talked to a lot of the fishermen down there in Jupiter, and nobody knows anything about this VMS unless you are somebody who is tuned in. I have to give credit to Wayne, I guess, Martian, who is up in South Carolina. He is the only guy who actually mailed it to the people who are concerned. He mailed out his letter, which was a concern. The council didn’t send it to the snapper grouper fishermen. It took one of them who was upset about it to do it. I said earlier I thought if you wanted to make the system, make it voluntary or put it on the boats that have violations and don’t put it on all of us to increase our burden, increase the amount of profits or take away the amount of profits that we might make, which are getting slimmer and slimmer. The other thing is I can’t believe with a $16 trillion debt that we can go out and spend money on a program like this. Anyway, those are my comments, I appreciate it.

MR. HARTIG: Thank you for reading that letter into the record; that was very well written and it really – you had your point of concerns and they were well stated. The question that I had about you talking about when you can land your catch, when your catch can be sold; there are some hail-in and hail-out requirements for VMS if I’m not mistaken. But I don’t think that in this particular VMS amendment, it is not tied to a catch share so you wouldn’t be tied to those same requirements that they have in the Gulf where you would have to unload at a specific time at a specific location. That is the only thing I saw that was questionable in your comments was that is not being included in this amendment. Gregg, correct me if I’m wrong. We don’t have that kind of specificity in the VMS amendment that unloading stations have to be identified; you have to unload within a specific timeframe. I don’t remember seeing or even discussing that.

MR. WAUGH: No, Appendix I that is available from the west side has the Gulf VMS regulations. The council has indicated thus far that they would put those same requirements in place. That has a declaration of fishing trip and gear, but does not talk about declarations and offloading. That is part of the ITQ program, catch share program.

MR. TINUTSEN: That may very well be, but right now that is the only example that I have to go by.

MR. HARTIG: No, I appreciate that. We’ve had these discussions already, even talking about catch shares where trying to convince law enforcement that the South Atlantic is not the Gulf. It is smaller boats; we unload just as you had said at odd times, and we have to be out the very next day. We’re day trip fishermen so it is not like we can have the luxury of waiting to unload in the morning before we leave. Sometimes that can be accommodated if you happen to sell to a fish house that also has a retail operation, where you could get there at five o’clock, unload and then still be able to do your day, but that is a minority case.

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In the discussions we’ve had concerning this, I have always brought forward how our area particularly in South Florida is different; that we do operate on a much different schedule than a lot of other places, and the importance of being able to go every day and not miss that one day of the week where it made your entire week. That is the critical part. That has been brought up in this VMS thing as well. If you have a break down in the middle of a season or at the beginning of a season, and you have to give up – some of our seasons are so short, that the economics, you would lose so much of your economics if you had to be down for a week before you could get your VMS fixed in a very short season. That would be a significant economic loss. All these things are coming to the forefront in this discussion, and the council will look at all these different aspects that have been brought before by the public in this discussion. I appreciate your comments they are very well done, and thank you for coming.

MR. McCOY: My name is Joshua McCoy. I work here at Wild Ocean here in Port Canaveral; I’ve got the fishing vessel Top Tuna. I am highly opposed to VMS. I could sit here probably for an hour and go on about why. There is no reason for us to have it, and all the negative things to go along with this VMS. There are a few things that I am going to start out with. Number one, the cost; we don’t need any more costs. We’ve got enough expenses as it is. We’re struggling with short seasons, low trip limits, high fuel prices. Everything is going up except for the price of fish. You’ve got to be competitive with the imports. I have had a VMS a few years ago, and I asked if this thing does pass would I be able to use the one I bought a couple years ago, and they said, no, they upgraded it. Yes, the government may reimburse you for the first one, but when they decide; it is all business, it is a money-making business that is all it is. The stockholders, shareholders and VMS when they decide they need a few more bucks, oh, let’s come out with a new one and make the commercial fishermen foot the bill.

Yes, we reimbursed them for the first one, but every couple of years let’s upgrade it and then they have got to put out $3,500. No telling how many times or how long they could – oops, we’ve got new satellites, we need new upgrade models, whatever their excuse is. That is one of them. Another one is you know we’re not on the catch shares over here. We’re not on the IFQ system over here. We don’t have a ton of marine protected areas yet, even though at that last meeting I saw the proposal for all of them and I just scratched my head. That was just absurd; the proposal for all those MPAs, but that is beside the point. We’re not on the catch share system so there is no need for this VMS thing right now. Now my feeling is you are trying to put this in place to go to catch shares, and you’ve heard from everybody in the South Atlantic we don’t want catch shares, we don’t want VMS but yet these two issues keep getting brought up at all these meetings. I don’t know if we’ve got to write it on our foreheads when we come into the meetings every time.

I was on the web seminar the other day and I said, you know, the Gulf is on the catch share system. If their machine goes down, they’ve got time to sit at the dock five or six days and wait and send the machine off and wait for it to come back or get a marine electrician who is busy the whole week to come down there a couple days later and fix it. They are on the catch share system. They are not going to have a huge loss of income sitting at the dock, but in some of our short fisheries, if we miss four or five days, you are talking about tens of thousands of dollars. Say, for instance, the tilefish, you lose five days during the time when the price is high in the beginning of the season, you’re talking about 12, 13,000 pounds you could lose. You’re talking about 30 some odd thousand dollars. That is unacceptable. Don’t say that law enforcement will work with you, because that is what I’ve heard. We have rock shrimpers who have the VMS and

5 they made them come in from the middle of the trip when theirs went out and made them sit at the dock. They had to wait days for it to get back from the shop. They won’t work with you.

We’ve asked for a VMS to keep at the fish house to put on them in case one does go down and they said we couldn’t have one at the fish house to hand out. It is unacceptable for us to lose any loss of income due to the big brother wanting to monitor us all the time. We are getting treated like criminals. All we’re doing is trying to go out there and work and run our businesses. I could see a huge loss of income. The thing that the guy said at the webinar is; yes, that is the difference between the Gulf and you all. You all are derby fishing here in the South Atlantic. Well, we’re only derby fishing because the South Atlantic has made our quotas so low. What is considered derby fishing? If you’ve got a high quota and you’re catching the same amount, but you’re catching it all year; is that considered derby fishing where you’re catching the same amount per day but you’ve got such a low quota that it ends in two months. What is the definition? That is the whole reason why we have derby fishing is because the quotas are so low. We’ve come up with ways and presented them a couple of times at different meetings to extend our seasons in some of these short seasons. They said that is not important at the time – or I forget what – it wasn’t high on the list.

But I guess this VMS is pretty high up on the list, because I see how this thing is getting railroaded through. Another thing that I don’t like it for is it is infringing on our constitutional rights. Amendment 4 Privacy Act, this thing is going to be on us 24/7 monitoring us. If you’ve got a trailer boat and you go to the house, this thing is monitoring you when you go to the store, when you are parked in your driveway, when you go to your girlfriend’s house. There is no power-down on it. Anywhere you go you are going to have this thing monitoring you. That is absurd. How would you all like if I put a tracking device on your truck outside and saw where you all went all the time? There are a lot of boats that park at private businesses, go up the canals into their boats on private property, put them on trailer boats and go to their house. This thing is going to be monitoring you all the time during that. I just don’t believe in this 24/7 monitoring, there is no power-down.

Say I wanted to take my wife and daughter out and we’re not doing any commercial activity – and that is what this is supposed to be monitoring is commercial activity – well, if I want to take my wife and daughter down to the Keys and go snorkeling, I’ve got big brother monitoring me during my vacation. It is unacceptable. I see where South Carolina; they are putting a big letter together to exclude them from this VMS. Well, if that happens, I think Florida should too and Georgia and North Carolina. I don’t see how you can do it to just a select few and not do it to everybody. The recreational is not getting it. I could ramble on forever, but I kind of lost my train of thought here.

MR. HARTIG: You covered a lot, Josh. Go ahead if you’ve got anything else to say. You can say it now or you can come back later, whatever you want to do.

MR. McCOY: No, I think that about wraps it up. I think I’m good, Ben.

MR. HARTIG: You hit a lot of good salient points on the issues so you did a good job. I appreciate your comments, Josh.

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MR. GARBER: My name is Chip Garber; I run a small boat out of Jupiter. I am opposed to the VMS for the boats. Basically in a small operation like mine, to go with the additional costs, reporting coming and going when you are just a day boat; it seems like an awful lot of effort is spent towards not fishing, but just complying with government rules. You’ve got the cost of installing it, the cost of replacing it, which if anybody here has had electronics go bad from saltwater exposure, you know what I’m talking about. The second time you replace the VMS it is going to be at your cost. It is not the government funding the cost of it then. You also have your monthly maintenance, which I’ve seen estimates that you guys put out from $45 to $80 per month. That is whether you’re fishing or not. The other thing is it seems like the grouper snapper boats are being targeted and treated like they’ve already violated the law, because they need monitoring to make sure that they don’t. It is more like you are considered guilty until you prove yourself innocent by having a 24 hour monitor showing what you are doing at all times. You want to target the grouper snapper boats, but what is monitoring all the recreational fishermen? They potentially could be as big a violator as what you’re calling the grouper snapper boats.

The other things that you cite as positives in the VMS system is you are already duplicating things that the logbooks are showing and also your trip tickets as far as information that can say where fish are coming from. I mean you’ve got areas that you have to report where you’re catching your fish. The other things like the safety equipment; that is redundant because you are already supposed to have an EPIRB. One of the examples they cite where the VMS saved a boat; well, that boat was running from a hurricane and they didn’t get their EPIRB down before the seas got so high that they couldn’t get up and get it. A lot of these things I think are redundant as far as citing that as a reason for having the VMS. Again, I want to state that I am opposed to it. I don’t feel like I need to be monitored 24/7 when I don’t have a criminal record. Now if boats have repeated violations, maybe those are the people that need monitoring, but I don’t feel that I’m one that does. I want to thank the panel for allowing me to voice my opinion on all of these things, too.

MR. HUDSON: Rusty Hudson; Directed Sustainable Fisheries. I am representing East Coast Fisheries Section membership tonight. In short, we want to voice our opposition to being mandated to have the VMS on the snapper grouper commercial vessels. I believe that the Snapper Grouper Advisory Panel said if you could make one size fit all for the recreational, the for-hire, and the commercial of all sorts, then maybe it is a different situation then. But having participated in the Marine Protected Area Expert Working Group and knowing that there was this plethora of MPAs being suddenly thrust onto the scene to protect speckled hinds and Warsaw groupers, that we feel haven’t had a relevant stock assessment in a long time; we don’t believe there is only 5 percent of each of them left as certain other people believe.

That realignment of those existing MPAs would be a good thing, because the Snapper Grouper Amendment 14 did not have a provision in there for research and monitoring. I’ve noticed that as of last summer they put in a little time to go out and research and monitor the existing MPAs deepwater, and tried to see if they’re located correctly. Now realignment we didn’t have a problem with. A lot of folks suggested how to make that a little better. That will be an argument down the road for the council, I believe after September meeting. But in the meantime, I also learned that if you wind up purchasing one of these units, you can get reimbursed as long as you didn’t have a history of a NOVA of NOPS or something that was adjudicated. Likewise, with the limit being $3,100 and if you wanted to get certain other features, it will cost you more, like

7 certain ones that you can get totally waterproof versus water resistant, scenarios about warranties and extended warranties.

Just like Josh mentioned, if you wind up having to overnight it and it takes a week or more, as some people have had the experience, and the fish are biting and the weather is good; and then by the time you get back on the ocean you may have lost 10 or 20 grand, who knows, in gross production. Right now we feel like a lot of the quotas are too small. As you know we have been working with our scientists and working with the National Marine Fisheries Service to try to improve the science and improve the size of the quotas and stuff like that. We know what we see at the side of the boat from the fishing experience historically and currently. It doesn’t seem to always match what is on a piece of paper that comes out of the Science Center. Right now we’re looking at some positive results for black sea bass. We just recently saw some positive results for golden tilefish, but at the same time the snapper grouper unlimited permits are in the numbers of 500 and some odd. Then there is another 100 and some odd 225-pound nontransferable limited permits. I would bet you that a lot of the 225-pound limited permit guys could not afford the monthly maintenance; the idea of paying for the unit again, if you do the analysis. Five to ten years down the road you can pretty much figure it is going to wear out at a certain point. I think that the HMS has a power-down option, but they are trying to reflect a lot of the Gulf choices. The idea of what is going on with the swordfish fleet and what is going on with the shark guys that are in the HAPC up there for sandbar off of North Carolina.; they’ve already been mandated to have them in ’08, but those units were half the cost.

And then suddenly they were thrust in a position to have to have new units this past year. Then they said, oh, we’re not going to reimburse you. But then after I guess a few clear minds spoke up, then they wound up saying, okay, we’ll reimburse them. Having re-outfitted that whole fleet, and then whatever is going on in the Gulf of Mexico besides – you know, there is an IFQ system over there that was being put in place before this current administration even came into being. Some of those people were mandated to have that. But I saw something on the slide that really disturbed me; it was the idea that guys with snapper grouper permits would just knowingly go and steal brazenly, and so that they would need that to be able to keep them in check. If I look at the numbers, the private recreational, the for-hire fleet, the other commercial permits as well as snapper grouper permits; the snapper grouper commercial permits represent a small percentage of that entire universe.

The idea that we’re going to go do backdoor sales and stuff has not really been associated with a lot of guys with snapper grouper commercial permits. It has been more associated with people without those permits. Whoever they are, I think that the state of Florida has had no more backdoor efforts for a few years; in fact, they busted a big ring last year. That was kind of interesting to read about all the snapper grouper, snook, venison and other types of things that they were taking illegally. Those are poachers, pretty simple math. Those are the guys that if we could police ourselves, we probably would. Yet we are in a democracy and I don’t think a lot of people like the idea of somebody monitoring everything.

There was as statement also that this could be a way to figure out where you were if you were in a tough way out on the ocean. But the reality is that if it is after five o’clock in the evening Monday through Friday and not a holiday, there is nobody sitting there at the console. If it is after Friday after five o’clock and Monday before eight o’clock, there is nobody at the console. There would be a couple of days later you might find somebody who figured out where you

8 were, if they even knew you were missing. That is why that EPIRB works good. I do know that they’re practicing with some drones and stuff, and maybe they can use some of that to monitor. Obviously, a lot of the snapper grouper guys have felt the impacts of all these ACLs set on so many stocks and watching these quotas caught up pretty quick. Because a lot of the stocks are coming back with a vengeance, meaning our catch per unit effort is just off the ceiling, and they have to basically sit at the dock tied up, and April is a great month to illustrate that. Come May 1, we’ll have a lot of differences; shallow water grouper open, we’ll have the red porgy able to be sold; come June 1, the black sea bass with the potential of the doubled up ACL. Then come July 1, we’ll have a vermilion snapper opening again. We still had 10 percent left from this first half season, plus we’re going to see a doubling of that quota and all chances that they will be able to fish right on through.

There are other things that we can do to make things easier on the fishermen, not harder. But the last thing you want to do is go and cost them thousands of dollars, and really the analysis needs to be done across five and ten years. In short, the message I’m here to deliver is that the economic impact is way too much and people feel that the intrusion of a constant surveillance is way too much. The combination makes it very unpalatable at this time. Hopefully higher minds will prevail and that the South Atlantic Council, when it does come to a vote, will vote 13 to 0 to make Alternative 1, no action – I mean, 13 to 0 as the choice of no action; because Alternative 2 and 3 is unpalatable, and we just would hope nobody else would vote for that. We were glad for the three folks that did stand up and say, nope. I have heard from a few other council members that they are pretty much getting the message that nobody wants to have these VMS.

The couple of people that might want them seem to want voluntary catch shares, but again that is not the people that are in our backyard, because they don’t seem to really want catch shares. With that said, let’s see what the MPAs do and don’t do this fall. Let’s see what the increased quotas do for everybody, and let’s just take it easy on everybody’s pocketbooks that are barely hanging in by an economic thread. This could be the straw that broke the camel’s back, particularly for that 100 and some odd 225-pound permit. Also you need to consider, as I said, a minimum threshold of unlimited transferrable permits that the two-for-one will not go down below. Then you can create a pool to put those extra ones in. As quotas increase, which I believe that we’re doing a great job rebuilding stocks, then that will be a chance to be able to bring some other people back into the various fisheries that may have had a historical participation, but for some odd reason may have been chasing sharks instead of golden tiles or sea basses or whatever. Thank you very much.

MR. BUSSE: Jim Busse, owner of Seafood Atlantic Cape Canaveral. Thank you, Ben and John, for allowing me to speak. I am here speaking for myself as a seafood dealer and speaking for my snapper grouper fishermen who fish for me. Many have directed snapper grouper permits, and quite a few have the 225. I find it hard to believe that I’m up here defending these guys and myself for a form of management that should never have even gotten this far. I mean, we’re standing here, we have Dave TNeutzen that came all the way up from Jupiter defending his future. He has a 225-pound snapper grouper permit, and he is up here fighting for his future. It just seems so ludicrous to have a snapper grouper fishery presently that is already severely crippled by mismanagement and not management. We all know that and we all sit here today, you know it, I know it, Ben knows it. This science that has closed our snapper grouper fishery down, our snapper fishery down is flawed and ridiculous; but yet we sit here today discussing VMS management.

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The VMS management is as flawed as the snapper grouper fishery management is. You’ve got that on top of that. It makes no sense to me at all. I guess sense isn’t a part of the program these days. Seafood Atlantic supports Alternative 1, which is no action. That is what is probably going to happen just from reading into what I am seeing here. But even if it doesn’t happen, I believe that to let it get this far is so wrong in a fishery that is so crippled. It is devastated not by what is in the water, not by the best available science, not by transparency, but it is based on a political agenda and a South Atlantic Council that has gone astray for so many years and let things happen to get us to the point that we’re in. We’re sitting here – it is a mockery to our management to sit here and defend ourselves as the participants in what it is that you are managing. You are managing us; you are managing the seafood producers of the South Atlantic; and you are managing us out of existence. This proposal should never have gotten this far. This needs to stop, and I’m sure it will. But it is here and we had to defend ourselves. We are guilty until proven innocent.

Right now the snapper grouper fishery was allowed for a brief moment in time to catch 50 pounds of snapper this year, the commercial fishery. Right now we are allowed to catch 100 pounds of snowy grouper. Right now we have been closed for six months for gag grouper. Right now we catch fifty cent blue runners and porgies and little fish that end up making the paycheck at the end of the week. For us to be imposed on a tactic that will not only be unconstitutional, but just downright mean to even approach this form of management is ludicrous. I think that the South Atlantic Council has painted itself – you are slowly getting out of your corner, but through the years you have painted yourself into a corner and you have painted us in that corner with you. It is a very ugly corner to be in. I hope that Alternative 1 is the preferred action; and I bid you a good day.

MR. COLBY: My name is Barrett Colby, and I represent myself. I would like to say that everything I heard Jim just say I second that. We’re talking about catching fish. You have now taken it to another level with the VMS. You have the Oculina Bank. We understand the coral and all of that, but I don’t know how many arrests you have had with the commercial fishing industry on the Oculina Bank. You know I oppose it. I’ve been opposing it from the very beginning. Where do you justify – I don’t understand what the purpose of this is. What are you getting out of this?

MR. HARTIG: Well, unfortunately, you missed the presentation which does highlight some of the things we get out of it. You get much better data collection, for one thing. You get the locations where people are fishing, general locations. You get specific locations, but we really look at a more general location. Just as an aside, if we were looking at this MPA thing and we had the locations of where people were fishing better than we do now, my intent would be to try and locate these MPAs where people didn’t have all the effort. You could ameliorate some of the impacts of the MPAs if we knew where people were fishing. When you fill out a logbook – and this will get to the positioning information – you have one species’ name; you have one location you can put in there. No matter how many places you’ve fished, no matter how many states you fished in, if you started your trip in Florida and ended up in South Carolina, you have one location that you put down where most of my fish were caught for that trip, most of that species, say, vermilion snapper.

If I made a trip from North Florida to South Carolina and I said, well, I caught most of them in South Carolina; that doesn’t tell us very much about what your trip did. The increases of data

10 collection would be of value. One of the things we haven’t talked about – and this area in particular when we did the amberjack trip limits, when we put those in a number of years ago, there were a number of people in this area that were very upset about they have to travel offshore, they have more fuel costs. They wanted multi-day trips. This is one thing VMS could have done and could do now for amberjacks in particular. You could set up – a boat could have a two-day or three-day or whatever you guys wanted or the council thought appropriate. There would probably be some kind of working together there to come up with that. It could work in your favor. In that scenario, it would show law enforcement that you were out for two days and that you could have that extra trip limit. That would double your return on your cost is significant.

Cobia is the same thing. A number of divers and fishermen have told me over time that they are out mostly three and four sometimes five days. The two fish per person cobia thing is tough for them. That is one of their species they target on those trips. They could have multi-day cobia trip limits, so that would help pay for those trips in that case. That is just some of the things that thinking through this whole process that I thought could help out, not just in this occasion. We’ve come back to the public. This is I think the third time we have thought about VMS. We wanted to know more in this go round. We wanted to put up the things that we could get out of it versus what you don’t like about it and try and get the fishermen to come forward with any support for it. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen much of that. It is a public process and this is how it works. If everybody in this room and every room I have been in tells me we don’t want it – I’m putting in a pretty position where I see some value, but if the public is overwhelmingly in this public process don’t want it; I can’t in good conscience go forward with it.

Everything that you guys have stated in the letters I’ve gotten and the e-mails I’ve gotten, and the public comment we’ve taken so far; it points to the economics at this time, after the great recession and the low trip limits that we’ve undergone, and the dire straits that industry is in right now; I’m convinced totally of that. Having said that, I have kind of showed my cards where my position is. I think the rest of the council may as well be convinced by these arguments. They’ve been very good. A number of people have pointed out a number of different things that I didn’t think about with VMS and the economics; the Coast Guard requirements for one thing. My gosh, I never really had an EPIRB on my boat until this year. That is another $780 that I had to spend. I don’t have to have the life raft, which all you guys do have to have and have it repacked on a yearly basis. Those kinds of expenses going into a fishery that has been in decline for a number of years; that is pretty substantial. We have become aware of all of these economic concerns to a much greater degree than we were before; at least from my perspective.

MR. COLBY: I just think the money could be better spent for all the fishing, for everybody that fishes that needs law enforcement. That money can be put on the whole fishery. You could use that money to watch over the whole fishery for everybody that participates in the fishery. You know the areas where the fish are going to be. You’ve got 21 fathoms, you’ve got the reefs. It is nothing that you can’t go do a sport recreational top shot or whatever it is called thing and get the numbers, and you can determine – you can do your own study. You have your vessels to study what fishes are going to be caught in those areas. I don’t know that any species besides I guess the speckled hind and the Warsaw that you’re concerned about. You are going to create an MPA for those, and where is it going to be at? You’re not going to use fishermen for that information to create the MPAs.

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MR. HARTIG: We have used both fishermen and the scientific information. Where the scientific information was lacking, especially as you get down this part of the world where we don’t’ have a lot of fishery-independent data over time, fishermen very much were a part of the MPA discussion and participated in that area and brought to the table a number of places which have had Warsaw and speckled hind in the past. Rusty, for one example, gave a number of locations to the MPA Workgroup of where when he was fishing had Warsaw and speckled hind.

MR. COLBY: You can gather that information without the VMS then.

MR. HARTIG: We can get information without VMS, yes, but the information we could have would not be as good, period. This would give us fishing locations for each vessel and we could put all those locators into spots on a chart like we’ve done for rock shrimp. It has been a very valuable tool for the rock shrimp fishery. We’ve been able to change – in the presentation that Gregg gave before, we’ve been able to change our management locations that we were going to close based on the VMS positions that the rock shrimp fishermen had given us over time and also had come from the monitoring of the program. VMS in the rock shrimp fishery has been positive for management of them. It has worked for them so far.

MR. COLBY: It is a very small fishery anymore. There are hardly any vessels left in it. The fishery that we’re in with this grouper snappers turned into a very small boat. You will see a lot of charterboats have these permits now. They are overburdened with it as it is now. You’re going to just put more burdens on them and more burdens on me that I don’t particularly want. I don’t believe that the government should be doing it. They should find other ways to take care of the fisheries and manage the fisheries besides putting a device on my boat that tracks every move I make. As far as the double – the more trips that catch more fish, like I said, it is a small boat fishery anymore. There are very few boats that would take advantage of being able to go for several days to load up on the fish and then come back in. You know what; if they want to do that, then let them purchase the VMS and let them be part of the program if that is what they want to do. But the people that have the small boats that don’t want to do it and don’t want to be part of it; maybe you can look at it that way, if you’ve got a group of guys. But I’ve never heard anybody say they want a VMS. I’ll let it go at that. Thank you.

MR. HUDSON: Rusty Hudson. I just wanted to follow up with a couple things about the MPA thing. As you know, I had a site fidelity issue going into the conversion of our Loran C and the actual spot, because speckled hind and Warsaws have a site fidelity, generally speaking. CRPs work real good. Something that did bother me; the rock shrimp is already a limited fleet and swordfish is, too, but the state department recently went and put a whole bunch of VMS tracks in that area east of here where they can legally fish. If you want to go swordfishing, you know where to go once you buy your permit based on what was put on the screen both to the South Atlantic Council and the Highly Migratory Species Advisory Panel. That we have a little bit of a problem with.

We have been trying to cooperate since back when we saw the handwriting on the wall with SEDAR 15 and the closure of red snapper coming in 2010; and then they wanted to close all this bottom from 66 foot on out to France. Then we wound up making some changes through SEDAR 24 so they were able to get rid of the 66 foot closure out to 240. Even though they kept on shrinking it down, it was right here in the heart of red snapper country from here – well,

12 actually I’m hearing Fort Pierce talking big talk about a lot of red snapper there, too, and sea bass right on up to the northern part of Florida.

Really, the idea of having like that Oculina Expansion that they want to do from Cape Canaveral all the way up to almost St. Augustine; and then they were going to stick more MPAs. I know some of the scientists are really ambitious about that; but some of them were so ambitious they didn’t even want fishing, transit or anything unless, of course, you went to a super-fast ping rate on your VMS and then zipped across there and that would be your fairway or transit zone. But that is something the rock shrimpers have to work out right now. With Coral Amendment 8, that is just not a finished product. As I indicated at the SSC meeting, there are several items that need to be done still. The socio-economic impact, you can’t even read about it right now; like when you look at this VMS thing, again that five-to-ten year idea and having to replace a unit at least once, maybe twice, maybe an antennae, and the other types of things where the ping rates go up or your price of normal a service a month might go up.

heard things from the west coast guys when I inquired about their history – Thrane & Thrane, I guess is the cheapest one – they had sent some people monthly bills for like a thousand dollars and stuff. It had something to do with a mistake that really was a bookkeeping thing, and then they had to straighten it out. That is what I was trying to say about the science. There are several ways to skin that cat as far as being able to understand where the people fish. Part of that is what we were trying to do with the cryptic biomass of red snapper that usually occur outside the range of the headboat. Likewise, when we’re dealing with speckled hind and Warsaw grouper, as we said, we don’t believe there are only 5 percent of them left. In fact some of the stuff that is showing up in the data with the 4 to 12 pounders off of North Carolina and mostly females seem to jive with what they were seeing back in the seventies.

As far as Warsaw groupers, I keep hearing stories, including from you, of a fair amount on certain locations. Then we can’t count the wrecks; and you know like I know how much those Warsaws seem to like those wrecks. Now with regards to all these steeples and stuff from here at the Cape right on up to Daytona and things, a huge part of those are dead. A lot of that Oculina is dead in the interior of it, and there is, whatever, not quite the attractant around it. But, the places that I did specifically get those big, male adult speckled hinds; I wanted site fidelity; why? Because then you could take the 20 hook vertical longline that the MARMAP and now SEFIS has the ability to use, but they’ve got budget constraints so they can’t use it; so that has been kicked to the side a little bit. The longline, the same deal with regards to finding things that you can do with a 100 hook thing, but then there are those cameras and then there are those ROVs.

As you and I both know going through the Pisces and Super Phantom ROV report from last year, which that report is not even finished, but going through the raw stuff, 700 and some odd pages, it was good reading, because when they did start looking at things like the snowy wreck up there, there was a pile of snowies on it. But then again they don’t like the idea of an MPA around a wreck. That was just, I guess, a bonus. But then the Georgia MPA seems to not be getting the bang for its buck. Some of those other ones needed the reorientation. That is really, back again, we don’t think that the VMS it is the time for it right now. But the other things of working with the industry, there is time for that, and that is what I would suggest to do. Thank you.

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MR. McCOY: Joshua McCoy: I just wanted to get a clarification on what you were saying with the trip limit. If you had a VMS, you were saying if you stayed out five days, you could multiply your trip limit times five, so if I was out five days I can catch 250 head of kingfish?

MR. HARTIG: Yes, I mentioned it for amberjacks, because that was the contentious issue at the time. That would have to be something that the council considered, how many multi-day trips could you have. Would it be two, three, depending on how many days you were out. They may not want to go to a five day. I mentioned five days; maybe that is not appropriate. I don’t know how many vessels are left that has the capability to hold – you’re talking about 1,200 pounds. In two days you’ve got 2,400 pounds. How many vessels – and Barrett made the great point how many vessels have that capability anymore? I’ve adjusted my boat – well, actually I haven’t adjusted my boat. My boat kind of adjusted to the limits. I had thought over years a number of times that I wanted to get a bigger boat, but I didn’t. It’s just kind of worked through time the size boat I have. I wouldn’t be a boat that would have multi-day trip limts. I can catch my trip limit on a daily basis. But, I have been sensitive to the concerns that a number of people have raised over time about that amberjack limit in particular where you have to travel so far. That’s one that I think – and cobia as well. Since it is so restrictive; I think cobia you can allow that as well. Now, kingfish, given the state of the kingfish fishery currently is probably one you wouldn’t want to do right now, but maybe in the future you could.

MR. McCOY: Why wouldn’t you just raise the trip limit? I thought a trip was going to and from the dock. Daily limit is kind of what you’re talking about, but if you stay out seven days, then you can multiply that by seven. I would just think you would just come up with a higher trip limit and a trip is a trip.

MR. HARTIG: If people are able to catch a higher trip limit on a daily basis, then you would have closures in the fishery that would cause problems. The multi-day trips, if you allowed people to at least have two trip limits, and you’re out for two to five days, you could still double your jack value in that trip. In these days of fuel prices and cost of trip, bait and, et cetera; I mean it is expensive to go fishing; I don’t have to tell any of you. None of our prices have gone down. As a number of you have mentioned, fish prices don’t seem to be staying up with the cost of doing business, and I agree with those statements. That is my observation in 40 something years I’ve spent on the water. But, no, I think you could – you could have a multiple day trip limit. It would just be how many trips could you have and still stay within the allocation.

MR. McCOY: I think what would be better is just have higher quotas for a lot of these species and a higher trip limit. That would be a lot simpler to me.

MR. MARTINEZ: I’m a little bit different than a lot of the other people in here in that I’m actually already using a VMS. I have a Gulf permit, and I fish the middle grounds. My name is Adrian Martinez, I run a boat out of Yankee Town, and it is under Jurassic Fish. We already have a west coast reef permit. We own a fair amount of quota; not a lot compared to what a lot of the people in the Gulf own, but it is enough for what we do. We actually had to get a commercial permit over there because we pretty much – we own a house in Yankee Town; my family does. We couldn’t go fishing anymore, because they basically closed the entire year recreational. You used to be able to go out and catch 5, 10 head of gags per person back in the day and now it was down to nothing.

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My cousin and I – I had always been involved in commercial fishing over here. I’ve fished with some of the guys in this room. I have been doing it here a long time. I am already involved in the VMS system over there so I understand it very well; and I also own a retail tackled store and I sell to a lot of the commercial guys. I see two major, major problems with going to VMS here. The number one problem with going to VMS over here is that is going to be the first step on the stairway to IFQ. I really, really, really oppose IFQ for the east coast. I think that this is a way of slipping in the first nail in the coffin. On the east coast we’ve got such a constrictive situation with the reef permits that have already been going down for so many years with the – you’ve got to buy two permits to get one. It has been squeezing it down, squeezing it down. As you know, most of the permits have migrated down south, because it is the only place where spending $40,000 on a permit really is worth it, because these guys are driving three miles off the beach to catch yellowtails. They have a permit, they go fishing, they catch 4 or 500 pounds, they’re getting four dollars a pound for the fish, and they burn 10, 12 gallons of fuel. Where you’ve got guys up here that are driving 30, 40, 50 miles to catch 1,200 pounds in amberjack at a dollar a pound of $1.10, or whatever it is at the time. You’ve already sucked a lot of that out of here to the point where – I mean, I’ll bring a thousand pounds of fish to Jim, all grouper and snapper. I can’t catch jacks over there, because the quota gets met so fast in the winter.

This is the first year that it hasn’t been met, because they put a 2,000 pound trip limit on the guys in the Gulf. Because before they had – I can’t remember what the quota was, but whatever it was in the hundreds of thousands. The guys in Destin, who only had to run 15 miles, were running out in the wintertime back to back to back to back to back and catching all the quota. I’d go to the middle grounds and I would be throwing back commercial jacks all day. I’m bringing him a thousand pounds of grouper and snapper, set it on the floor in the fish house and he goes, “When are you going again?” We can’t meet the demands because all of the permits have migrated south on the east coast. The Gulf fish; there are a lot of fish being caught in the Gulf, and they have been raising the quotas over there steadily.

But the thing that I see, that is the number one step of it going towards an IFQ program over here, which I think is going to be – I think it will collapse the east coast fishery. The Gulf fishery, I think the only reason why it has been able to survive with an IFQ is because there were so many people in it that made so much money off of it going to IFQ. Without going into like a three hour explanation of why I think that it is basically the most un-American thing in the world; this is coming from a person who in the last three years I have been buying quota. I still think it is an un-American thing. I am just stuck having to play the game. If I want to be able to fish the Gulf of Mexico, which is one of my favorite places to fish; I have to play the game.

The game is you’ve got to own quota. I brought this up before at a meeting, probably two years ago. I want to understand – and this is all I want to say about IFQ; I want to understand how IFQ is anything other than taking all of the quota and putting it in the hands of very few so that eventually it is easy to squash those few. Before you had the Gulf fishery; which was comprised of a bunch of longliners, and a bunch of pin hookers like me that were fishing on small boats and catching 1,000 to 2,000 pounds a trip and then all the guys that are fishing the oil rigs up around in the Gulf Coast and Texas and stuff that aren’t having to run very far and able to make good trips, and they’re catching a lot of red snapper because there is a lot of habitat; so you have this vast fishery.

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You go to IFQ with a weird sample rate that was convinced and pushed on all the fishermen by the elite few. I don’t care what anybody tells me, you can’t tell me that there wasn’t a steak dinner somewhere with the ten heavy hitters saying, listen, guys if you convince everybody of this, you guys are going to get rich. Because those guys in Madeira Beach that were the heavy hitters were going around, and they were buying up boats from people that they knew had history; and everybody is like why do these guys got 10 commercial boats in their yard that are all on the Hill, all with permits? Then the second that went to IFQ, they stripped all the quota off of those permits, put them on their permits and then sold the permits before – you know, originally a lot of people didn’t really know what was going on. Then comes the black market side of it where when gag grouper first became introduced to be able to be sold amongst the fishermen, it was eight dollars a pound, then it was ten dollars, then it was fifteen, then it was twenty, then it was thirty and now it is forty-five; and red snapper is fifty-five dollars a pound.

Tell me what American on the Planet Earth can go and join a fishery and fork out the kind of money that it takes to get quota. I’ve got 5,000 pounds of quota and you know what we had to do to get that? We had to buy boats for $65,000, strip everything off of them, and sell everything on them to get 500 pounds of quota. That was our profit buying and selling a boat. Who that is a fisherman, that is somebody that is going to wake up every day at 4:00 in the morning and drive out into the ocean and spend their life providing seafood for Americans is going to have the money or the wherewithal to do that to make that happen?

My point that I’m making is – and then let’s talk about the value of the quota. Why is the value of the quota so high? Well, it is inflated because the fish houses are buying it and the fish houses are using it to step on the commercial fisherman’s head and say, hey, buddy you are going and you’re throwing back 500 pounds of red snapper a trip and burning through four flats of bait to do it. Make at least a dollar a pound on them; I own the quota; I’ll lease it to you for $3.25 and I’ll buy your fish from you for $4.50. You’ve created this whole crooked, convoluted system where now the fish houses are in control. They are the only ones that have the money to buy the quota; that is why the price is so high. I won’t even go into the illegal stuff that is going on with it. That is why the price is inflated. If you want to talk about that some other time we can. But that is why it is fifty dollars a pound. It is not fifty dollars a pound because those guys think it is a smart investment. It is because they’re making more money on it per pound when they sell it, and they’re pulling trickery and they’re selling stuff for cash, and that’s why that is happening. But, that is set aside.

Since I oppose the IFQ system so much from what has gone on in the Gulf and what I have seen over there; that is why I think the VMS is literally the first step towards that. Maybe these guys don’t see it, because they haven’t been involved in the IFQ system and I have. I am on year three of it. I’ve seen what has gone on. I don’t want that to happen over here, because I know that this fishery is already depressed as it is. The other thing that I really vehemently oppose about it is that in retail, which is something I know very well; a lot of these big retail stores that you go into when you go into a Bed Bath & Beyond or a Home Depot, they take down your phone number and they want your information, right. What they’re doing is – and I actually noticed it this morning – I’ve got a West Marine catalogue at my house.

A West Marine catalogue came to the wholesaler that I deal with in the back of my building. They were two different catalogues; they had a different back page. Mine had a coupon on, it his didn’t, because I am what they consider, in their mind, from the history of business that I’ve

16 done with them which was ten years ago; I am what they call a retail customer; he is a wholesale customer. He doesn’t get a coupon; I do. They are going to use the information of where these boats are fishing against the fishermen. What is going to happen is when they see from January 1 to February 28 that these guys all spent the entire two months up on Achan Bottom and Chris Benson catching big kingfish, then all of a sudden the scientists are going to say, oh, well, they’re up there spawning, and that is why we’re going to close it for two months then. I don’t see how this information that they hope to get by using the VMS is going to do anything other than to strangle the fisherman. It has created a “good old boy” club in the Gulf. I’m telling you right now; any of these guys in this room, if they went over there and fished and saw what I saw and then woke up one day and said, you know what, fishing is great over there, I really want to go fish the Gulf and I want to live over there; because I think that will be a better way for me to make a living; they can’t do it, period. The barrier to entry now is corporate. How much money do you think it takes for a commercial fisherman to make a decent living for the amount of work that he is doing over there?

See, I’m not doing it to make a living. This is something that I do to supplement my income. I have a retail store. My cousin is an orange grove farmer. We’re fishing because this is the only way we can fish, and I’ve been commercial fishing my whole life. You know what? What I enjoy is going and catching a lot of fish and taking them to a fish house and providing good fish for Jim to make money on, for the restaurant that sells them to make money on, and for all of the people who sell the stuff that is in the course of going fishing that stimulates the economy. I’m an American; I think it is my right to go do as much work or as little work as I want to. I happen to work on my time off, so I would go over there and fish like a mule when I could be sitting around here, because I don’t need to go make the money. But I like it; I like to work. You’d think if they catch $100,000 worth of fish a year, they should be able to make a living, right? If you work backwards from that, $100,000 worth of fish at five bucks a pound, let’s call it, on average, which it is not going to be – what is that 2,000 pounds of fish – 20,000 pounds of fish. Twenty thousand pounds of fish, to lease that quota in the Gulf, if you got a good rate on your red grouper and you got a good rate on your red snapper; out of those 20,000 pounds you are going to pay 60 to 80 to lease it.

Unless you’re fishing for mangroves and B-liners, and we all know that putting mangroves on the boat in any kind of fashion of quantity – I mean, I fish my ass off for those mangroves over there, and I might catch a hundred fish a trip at a three pound, four pound average. If I bring him 400 pounds of mangroves for a trip, that was a good trip. The mangroves are free fish, because they don’t have quota. But I see a huge danger in this fishery going to that. Then what is going to happen is the guys that were fishing here for years and years and years that are already tired, and they are only doing it to continue to make a living, they are going to have the quota and they are going to sell it to guys like Antonio. The next thing you know Antonio is going to be making $22,000 a year floating around in the ocean every single day when he could go make that working at McDonalds. Then he’s going to go screw this, it is not worth it, I’ll see you later. He is going to go work at Home Depot and make $35,000 and then you’re going to have one less guy providing fish for Jim, providing fish for everybody else who makes money on fish along the way, so you’ve got this danger of collapsing the fishery. The fish houses in the west coast, they don’t have a clue what is coming. Because let me tell you something, there are not a lot of guys like me out there, and the guys that were doing it for a living; I’m watching them fold up like lawn chairs in Yankee Town. When I moved there –

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MR. HARTIG: Wayne, I let you go off on the catch share tangent because it is tied to VMS, because in the Gulf it was part of the Gulf’s program; but the South Atlantic Council has already made the decision not to go ahead with catch share programs. The debate of whether to go in that direction is really not pertinent to this conversation. You’ve gone a little bit too far in that direction.

MR. MARTINEZ: What do you feel is the main reason why they want to institute VMSs on the east coast then?

MR. HARTIG: Well, there are a number of reasons why we wanted to institute VMS. The council sees value in that in data collection. It sees value in enforcement for their MPAs, specifically for Warsaw and speckled hind. There are a number of things we could do in management that would help fishermen being able to have more catch per trip.

MR. MARTINEZ: If they really did what you were saying, I would agree with that 100 percent. If they are going to tell a guy that he is able to have a two day amberjack limit because they have a VMS and they can prove when they left and prove when they came back, sure; but to me those things are directly linked.

MR. HARTIG: You’re right about that. Some people have told me, well, the fault of your argument is that you didn’t link them; and if you would have linked that into this VMS debate, it may have changed at least some people’s mind about VMS. Then the economics that works against you can be overshadowed by the economic value you could get if we did have that. That is a logical comparison to be able to bring those two together and to be able to link them in this amendment, which we didn’t do, which probably would have been of value to do to give the public more reason to buy into it.

MR. MARTINEZ: I think that is the reason why everybody is so wary of it. It is kind of like one of those things like if you were trying to make a deal with a guy on a house; you want everything in writing. You don’t want the guy to say, oh, well, if you do this, I am going to go ahead and throw in all this work that I’m saying. If you want to further put the thumb on the fishermen, you have to give them a little bit something else so that it makes sense for them financially or give them an incentive to say, okay, well, if you’re going to be watching me this intently and want to know every little thing about what I’m doing; there has got to be a back end on it for me, because they’re already stretched out.

It is already hard to make a living as a fisherman; especially here we’re running 30, 40, 50 miles. When the jacks are biting, he can’t go two days in a row, because he’s got to spend an afternoon catching bait to be able to do it. I’m sure you know these situations. I think that it just seems like over the last five years it has been like, nope, you can’t have that, you can’t have that, you can’t have that, you can’t have that. There has been no, well, here you go. I think that in this situation, if you really want this to happen, if you really want to add $3,000 and then a monthly fee to these people and – let me tell you something. There is another problem with this is the added hassle of having to deal with the inspections, because I had to deal with a guy that tried to tell me that when I got back in after running seven hours in a 25 knot headwind from the middle grounds that I wasn’t allowed to tie my boat up to the dock, because you are not allowed to land even at a designated landing site if you’re not within the window of declaration. In the Gulf it is a three hour declaration; I declared my trip about an hour and a half out, because it was the only

18 time that I could stand still in the boat long enough to be able to make the phone call, because I had a wind come on anchor at night. I’m talking about that is the roughest weather I’ve ever been in in my life, and I wasn’t going to stop and make a satellite phone call.

MR. HARTIG: That is a particular part of the Gulf catch share program and is not part of our VMS amendment. We’re not going to have the landings declaration requirements.

MR. MARTINEZ: That is one – that is a big issue with these guys. They are turning and burning. They don’t have time to sit and wait for someone to inspect them and not touch the dock and all that stuff. I think that if you are going to do something like that, that needs to be in writing like, okay, you guys are going to get a two day limit if you adopt this program, because we need more information from you; but if you’re providing us with this opportunity to be able to fish and catch double our limit when we can prove that we’ve been out for two days, then maybe it makes sense. It just seems very vague; I don’t know. I have a hard time. My skepticism is because I’ve seen what has gone on. I feel like this is, yes, we’re not doing IFQ right now, but this is the beginning of it happening. I think that is why I am fearful.

MR. HARTIG: That is a valid concern and a valid comment and I appreciate that.

MR. MARTINEZ: Sorry to be long-winded, but I think that is important information, especially these guys need to know.

MR. HARTIG: That information on the Gulf stuff was valuable. Catch shares; you trade one set of problems for another set of problems that you hope you can solve by looking at the problems that had occurred in other catch share programs. We’re not doing that now.

MR. MARTINEZ: The problem is those problems that we’re talking about are not small ones. They will put a stranglehold on that fishery sooner than later. It is already happening in Alaska; it is happening up north. I just see it as like another opportunity to find another reason to fine some guy. That guy told me – he said if you do this again; I will fine you. I go, well, get your pencil sharpened, because the next time I come in, I am tying my boat up at the dock, and I’m not anchoring my boat next to my dock so that I can go to bed because you didn’t show up.

MR. GIANBANCO: My name is Antonio Giambanco. I run a boat out of Port Canaveral, it is a 29 foot CV. It holds probably 1,500 pounds of fish. I try to go out almost every day, even in bad weather. A lot of people know me for going out in some stupid stuff. The VMS is not right; it is wrong. I’ve seen what happened in the Gulf. I fished in the Gulf. Like Adrian said, it is just wrong with the VMS. You guys say we don’t have to do the declaration and we don’t have to do all that, but at the end point it is hard to believe anything you guys say, because you say you’re not going to do it. The next thing you know two seconds later, oh, yes, we’re going to do that. We don’t need it. If you want, take those $6 million that you have in that research plan for VMS and put it towards active research. Pour it on us, say, hey, look, we would like to charter one of your boats, or charter somebody; we want to go out there; we want to see what you guys see; and not put a tracking system on us, make us look like criminals, like we had ankle bracelets. Every waking minute of our life we’re being tracked.

We’re doing everything we can to keep up with your regulations that you’ve got going on right now, which are an absolute joke. I’m throwing back – almost 70 percent of what I catch I can’t

19 keep because you guys say there are none of them out there, when every bait that hits the bottom is a fish that could go to somebody that could eat it. I just think VMS is wrong. You guys don’t need it. Take that money and put it some place in the right places. The monthly payment, yes, $60 or $80; you guys are holding back on what is really behind it. It will go up higher. You could have monthly payments up to $1,000 just on stupid little things. VMS is no. That’s it.

MR. BUSSEN: My name is Scott Bussen and I run the Relentless here at Port Canaveral. I am a charterboat captain and I fish in the snapper grouper, both commercial and recreational sector. I also have a kingfish permit, lobster permits and so and so. I am here to speak opposing the VMS. I am sure a lot of it has been said already; and obviously the financial crisis most of us are in, it is just ridiculous to think that we could be paying upwards of $60 to $100 a month out of our pocket for somebody to watch what we’re doing. I have been in this business since 1987 when I graduated high school. I have never had a fisheries violation on my boat, whether I worked on it or not. In my estimation, VMS to me is equivalent to somebody having an ankle bracelet and being stuck in their house. I don’t think I should be penalized. If somebody is fishing the Oculina Bank, that person should be penalized. I am all for that; make your penalties stiffer. If you get caught in there, then make them have a VMS and make them pay for everybody’s VMS. I don’t care. Honestly, I’ve been in the business since ’87 and I haven’t had a violation.

I don’t see why I am going to be penalized because maybe the state of Florida or the federal fisheries can’t monitor all these new places that you guys are making where we can and can’t go. I understand some things need to be fixed; but having us pay for it, I don’t think is the answer. My biggest concern is what if the federal funding kind of runs out and all of a sudden we’re paying for all of it out of pocket, and the system goes out in about two or three years, because it is on a 36 foot boat that gets beat to death and is wet all the time. I replace electronics probably once or twice a year, various things; radios, bottom machines, you name it. They don’t last. If all of a sudden you are going to hit me with a $3.000 VMS thing; if the goal is for us to sell our permits and walk away, then just tell us now, because there are a lot of us that just can’t afford it. In addition to that, we can’t fish for grouper when they’re here. Grouper is closed for five months this last year, December until May 1, this year. The fish are here right now. We know where they’re going to be May 1; they are going to be on their way back to the Carolinas the same way they always are. I can’t even fish in the fishery I’m involved in and now you want to put a monitoring device on my boat to decide where we’re fishing. I don’t get it.

My other problem is I fish in three different fisheries. I’m going to spend the next three months charter fishing. I can’t fish for grouper for five months, yet I am going to probably have to pay $60 to $100 a month the months I am not fishing for them. Then I am going to spend three months charter fishing, maybe two weeks grouper fishing in May, maybe two weeks lobster diving in August and my year is over. Then you’re looking at me spending, what, $1,000 a year on it? I don’t understand it. It seems like every time I’m here, I am here to oppose something, and I hate that. I would rather be here to pat you guys on the back. Obviously, when it is looking like I’m going to be spending more money that I don’t have; there are a lot of us little guys that – Antonio that just spoke, he’s got a little 32 foot CV. He probably doesn’t have room for it on his boat. With all the stuff I’ve got to have on my boat, even though it is 36 foot, I don’t know that I have room for it. I’ve got to have a head for my clients. I’ve got to have bunk space for me to sleep if I go multiple days.

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You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. I am sure I have a bunch more things to say. I’m going to leave it at that and just say I’m opposed to it. I’ll put it all in writing and have it a little better form. Unfortunately, I was on vacation for five days and just got back and had to fish today. I didn’t have time to get my stuff prepared, but I think you got the gist of what I’m saying.

MR. HARTIG: Loud and clear. We could actually talk about a couple of other things if you would like.

MR. HUDSON: Before you leave VMS, May 3 is the deadline for the written comments. I would suggest that anybody that is the owner of a snapper grouper permit submit a written comment before May 3. If you look in the very back of the public hearing document, that address and everything is there.

MR. HARTIG: I will tell you that we’ve gotten more comments on VMS than any other issue besides red snapper in a long, long time. A lot of people have taken the time to comment on this issue and the council is going to have a lot of information to go over at their meeting when we decide which way we’re going. That is a good thing. We’ve had a lot of public input in this public process, and that is why it is a public process. I wish we had this kind of input on everything we did, but unfortunately we don’t. I want to applaud you for coming to this hearing and taking the time out to do that. I think what I would like to do is have Gregg – he gave us a little bit of an update on black sea bass. There is some good news in black sea bass coming right on the heels of golden tilefish and vermilion snapper, good news in both of those fisheries; golden tilefish a bit of a while back, a little over a year ago. Vermilion snapper now is not overfished and no overfishing occurring. We’re going to be able to remove that four-month recreational closure that we’ve had for vermilion snappers, and we are going to increase the commercial allocation as well.

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