March 9, 2017 — In Weird Al Yankovic’s cult ’80s film “UHF,” contestants play for their weight in fish on a game show called, “Wheel of Fish.” A woman, the returning champion, gets the first spin at the wheel that, yes, sports a number of fish tied to it at regular intervals. Then the wheel stops.
“Ah, a red snapper,” says the show’s host, a character played by Gedde Watanabe. “Mmm — very tasty.”
They are tasty, which created a problem the closed red snapper season off the Southeast United States was supposed to solve — rebuilding the fish’s population so as to allow both commercial and recreational fishing for red snapper once again.
At the Tuesday morning meeting of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Snapper Grouper Committee meeting, there appeared to be some progress in moving toward reopening red snapper fishing in federal waters off Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas.
Zack Bowen, a charter fisherman from Savannah, pushed the need for movement, saying, “The recreational anglers are mad as hell,” charter operations are starving for business and there needed to be something done soon to address opening red snapper fishing.