Confirm or Deny Rumors

I was talking with someone today who just got back from a fishing tourney on the east cape.
It was either 400 boats or 400 anglers entered, I do not recall, but the biggest fish of the two day tournament was a 16 lb tuna. This guy got skunked.
He said the Mex gov't opened up commercial fishing to long liners within 15 miles of shore and that they are killing thousands of marlin a week.
Can anyone confirm or deny this????

I confirmed a couple months ago about this.

1 long liner will kill more marlin in 1 month than the sport fishing industry in a year.

-Brian G

He did give me a ridiculously high number of marlin kill per week. I guess he was right. That is also why his place down there is going to go up for sale. Real sad.

http://www.billfish.org/new/

"The vessel, legally permitted, was fishing drift gill nets in excess of the 1000 meters allowed by Nom-029. Eighty-eight sharks, 43 marlin and as many as 20 giant manta rays were in the hold when it was seized.  "Again we are seeing a real life example of the inherent flaws in Nom-029,"

Illegal Shark Vessel Seized with Marlin Aboard


On Saturday the Mexican Navy seized an 80-foot converted shrimp vessel, Jesus Omar "El Choncho", fishing off Los Cabos with three sharks and three marlin onboard.  The Mazatlan-based vessel was outfitted with close to two miles of drift gillnets and was apparently fishing with a forged shark permit.  The catch, although small and likely taken by an inexperienced crew - it was their second trip - indicates that rather than diminishing fishing effort and promoting shark conservation the so called "shark fishery" legalized by NOM-029 has become an incentive to convert vessels with gill net and longline gear - and increase overall fishing mortality - on depleted, low value shark stocks and seek profits by taking large numbers of billfish as the real economic incentive.  This is the exact outcome that TBF had previously predicted to Conapesca.  Click here to read the Mexican news report.


-Brian G

Mexico does what it wants.  They closed the the Revillagigedo Islands a year after I went to them.  They are doing the the same to the Albies and Blue Fin (Top $$$) that are headed up our coast.  That's a wrap.

Ken kickfish

Tote:

I would blame this less on overfishing and more on season to season variablity.  Some years the cape is nuts, some years the bait just never shows.  My good friend and co-worker was just down there and the water was green and no bait to be see...a function of water temp, nothing else.  It was like that one year when we went down as well.

Mexico is getting its act together in regards to fisheries, and when we were in PV some of the places we used to fish were now large no-take reserves and the fisherman are cool with it...sounds more advanced than here!

Sean, aren't you following the Shark Norma deal? It is a serious issue at the Cape, where retention of certain sportfish was prohibited to commercials. Now they are allowed to keep them as by-catch.

PAL: not following it, but I'll check it out.

Sean - Great, looking forward to your perspective on the issue. You always bring a nice dose of level-headedness to fisheries issues.

I think it is Norma 29?

-Brian G