Saving Seafood

TEXAS: How a Battle Between Recreational and Commercial Fishermen Spawned a Conservation Movement

April 16, 2020 — On fall and winter nights through the better part of the twentieth century, Rudy Grigar would wade into Galveston Bay and listen to the roar of the redfish. Swimming in schools up to five hundred strong, they sounded to him like freight trains churning through the dark. “The closer they got,” he recalled in a 1997 memoir, “the louder the noise.”

Occasionally, the schools would plow right into Grigar, a pioneer of wade-fishing in Texas, thumping against his legs and chest as he cast in the moonlight, trying his best to land two or three on a silver spoon lure before they swept past. Then he’d wait for another school to come along. “I’d repeat the process until I had a full stringer,” Grigar wrote in Plugger: Wade Fishing the Gulf Coast, a book that remains a saltwater-angling bible long after Grigar’s death in 2001 at age 86.

Grigar, who owned a tackle shop in Houston, had been fishing the state’s shallow bays and estuaries since the Great Depression. In the early seventies, he was still landing countless bounties of redfish, also known as red drum, and up to a hundred speckled trout in a day. By the end of that decade, though, the glory days had come to an end. Trout were in steep decline, and more than half of the redfish had disappeared.

Read the full story at Texas Monthly

High rollers, big names back CCA agenda across U.S. & N.C

September 17, 2015 – “The CCA has nothing to do with conservation unless you consider sport fishermen having all of a certain species allocated to themselves as conservation.”

Those are the words of author Robert Fritchey, who wrote the definitive book tracing the history of the Coastal Conservation Association, titled “Wetland Riders”.

The CCA traces its roots to Texas in 1977 and was originally founded by mostly wealthy anglers in Houston.

Fritchey describes the group as consisting entirely of “about twenty sportsmen, some wealthy, some not” who were convinced commercial fishing was killing sport fishing in Texas bays.

The group of men named their organization the Gulf Coast Conservation Association (GCCA). And it didn’t take long for the wealthier sport fishermen to take over.

Analysis

Fritchey ticked off the names of those early leaders in the first chapter:

  • Walter Foundren III, a Houston oil executive and Exxon heir, was named chair of the Executive Committee.
  • Perry R. Bass, another billionaire Texas oilman who in 2005 was rated by Forbes at the 746th wealthiest American, also served on the committee.
  • The GCCA’s first president, David Cummings, was a Houston real estate investor.
  • The vice president was Clyde Hanks, another wealthy resident of Houston described as an “insurance magnate.”

Read the full story at The Outer Banks Voice