After more than six hours of driving and three hours of protesting on the Capitol lawn, Capt. Brant McMullen sounded surprisingly euphoric.
He and 54 other fishermen left the Ocean Isle Fishing Center on a hired bus at 4 a.m. Wednesday. At noon they joined what turned out to be about 5,000 other fishermen, he said, to ask the U.S. government for an overhaul of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.
“It was actually impressive,” McMullen said. “There were folks from as far away as Alaska.”
The Act is the primary law governing marine fisheries management in United States federal waters. Its goal is to end overfishing and rebuild fish populations.
Recently, several rules generated by this act have caused moratoriums on catching some very lucrative fish – red snapper and most grouper species to name a few – that apply to commercial and recreational fishermen. Many fishermen say the severity of the rules and the number of restrictions that have been enacted in such a short amount of time is killing jobs and eroding fishing communities.