My Daughter's First Fish
As a longtime lurker on Ifish, I've been meaning to post here for a long time. I understand that it's customary for newcomers to post a fishing story as a way of introduction. Thinking about this for a while, I decided to tell the story of my oldest daughter's first fish.
We had moved to Mendocino County back in 1989. Living in the SF Bay area was getting old, with real live murders down the block. My wife and I had a new baby girl... I always wanted to live in the Ft. Bragg area because of all the fishing opportunities.
Once we settled in, I took my daughter, then five years old, down to the rocks at the coast, in a new state park, and showed her how to rockfish. She caught on quick and outfished me that day. It took years before she let me hear the end of it.
It was only years later that I learned that she had caught her first fish in a marine reserve. Actually, it was a really weird marine protected area, established by a ballot proposition in California back in the 1980s. This particular "ecological reserve" allowed commercial finfishing but prohibited recreational take of all species. Commercial take of inverts (urchins) or other kinds of shellfish were also prohibited in this MPA.
The statute of limitations on this crime has expired, and the truth can now be told. We violated the sacred protection of marine resources in California.
We released all the fish we caught that day. Nobody knew about it being a closed area. It was only recently, with the passage of the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), that marine protected areas that already existed in California became noticed. Today, the docents at the park will shout at you with bullhorns (literally) if you get near the reserve. The MPA we fished in that day was converted into a reserve during the implementation of the MLPA law. This law requires more reserves, and the state is moving quickly to force these new MPAs down the throats of California's remnant population of fishermen.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. It was a sad day when I realized that our wonderful outdoors experience, where I taught my daughter how to fish, had turned us into criminals.
There is a moral to my story. Area closures might be a postive management measure if they are based on good science and a date-certain when they will be evaluated quantitatively for success, modification or removal. That's not the way MPAs are being implemented in California. They are being implemented "just because."
Who can argue against "ocean protection"?
If my kids are a serious threat to marine resources I'll eat my RFA hat. Fishermen in other states would be wise to take notice of the situation here, and get very jumpy over sidewinding attempts to hijack fishery management under the guise of "habitat protection."
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Salty Walty
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