Cobia Fishing --- by Jake Worthington

 

Last month I explained how the 2016 Cobia Season was almost closed before the NC and VA season even began. The SAMFC had determined that the Cobia Fishery was overfished in 2015, and this had generated the closure for June 20, 2016. The agency claimed they had no choice to close the fishery because of Magnum-Stevenson Act passed by Congress. The lines were drawn in the sand, and this resulted in a grassroots fight to not allow the states of NC and VA to follow along in this closure. The grassroots movement was started by Virginia resident Jonathan French who not only loves to Cobia fish, but he also loves his job as a Washington, DC, policy specialist. French works the halls of
DC at the nation’s capital and understands the ins and outs of how the laws and regulations work. He was familiar with how government regulatory agencies work, and what gave them their rulemaking authority. Mr. French was a godsend to the grassroots movement because he could decipher the data and the rules and show how the agency was not even following their own policy and rules.
I first met Jon French when I began pier fishing when I was 9 years old. He and his family would come to the pier and stay for a week. French would live on the end of the pier live baiting for Cobia and King Mackerel. We would spend hours talking while waiting for a fish to bite. Jon French, in a nutshell, is a man who loves to fish and really loves to Cobia fish. Luckily for the grassroots movement, they now had an advocate that not only loved to fish but worked in Washington,
DC, and knew how the system worked.

The first thing French did was read the Magnum-Stevenson Act to determine why the SAMFC had acted like it did. First, French found that Virginia had no representation on the SAMFC and was trying to close a season that would cause a negative economic impact. That brings us to the next violation that French uncovered, and that was that the SAMFC had not done an economic impact study on how closing the season would affect the state and its economy. French pointed out these violations to both NC and VA officials and tried to rally both boards to use this as a valid reason on how the SAMFC was violating its own policies, regulations, and rules.

Then the water really got muddy when SAMFC was also challenged on why the boundaries existed between the Atlantic and Gulf Cobia species. SAMFC insists they are different genetic fish, and they don’t go from one area to the other. French attacked this data that the SAMFC was using and showed it was flawed. As I am wring this article, the SAMFC is still working to close the season in 2017 calling for a spawning closure. If you are a fisherman, you will need to be proactive like Jonathan French has shown us. Without his inside knowledge, it would have been very possible that we would have lost the 2016 Cobia season.

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