I was planning to write this column about the decision the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission made during its mid-November meeting in Nags Head. And about how another politician showed up at the meeting and ran his mouth, threatening the Commission with legislative override if commissioners were too tough on commercial fishermen when they voted on a plan to save the state’s southern flounder fishery.
But I’m still too upset about recreational fishermen getting an annual Oct. 16-Jan. 1 closure on flounder in inside waters when the rod-and-reel crowd only catches about one of five flatfish taken from North Carolina waters — when the cut in projected harvest should have been taken wholly out of the commercial fishery, what with recreational anglers having already had their creel limit cut twice and their size minimum increased.
I have learned from my intelligent, darling wife that when I’m this angry, I just need to shut up until I calm down. I’ve had a difficult time controlling my anger since my favorite football coach, Mark Richt, was fired at the University of Georgia, my alma mater, so I’m already at “towering inferno” level. Rather than getting really, really upset in print about flounder, I’m going to hold my tongue until another day.
Plus, I want to introduce readers to a couple of new features that debut in this issue of North Carolina Sportsman. We are starting a new Fishing Forecast section to try and better meet readers’ needs. Instead of reporting in the space of three of four paragraphs each the prospects for fishing on dozens of bodies of water, we’re going to concentrate on just a handful of destinations that offer fishermen particularly good opportunities in particular months and cover them in more detail. You might say that we’ve gone from a shotgun approach to a rifle approach. Either way, we hope we hit your bull’s eye.
The second change is the way we’re presenting the photos you, the reader, sends us of fish and game. We hope to run at least two-dozen photos every month of the big flounder, trout, bream and bass you’ve been catching, along with those deer, turkeys, hogs and ducks.
We are taking the Hunting Scrapbook that has been a regular feature and adding all of the reader-submitted fishing photographs to make a new Hunting/Fishing Scrapbook. We feel like we’ll be able to publish more photos year-round and let readers know they’re a big part of the magazine.
If you have a good digital hunting or fishing photo, please feel free to send it, along with plenty of information, to dank@scsportsman.com. We hope to be able to use almost every photo we receive within a couple of months’ time.
One of our New Year’s resolutions is to provide even better coverage of hunting and fishing in North Carolina. We hope we succeed.
