Unenviable time for Dr. Braxton Davis to oversee DMF
A guy I know who has owned a tackle shop on North Carolina’s coast for decades posed a question the other day I had to admit I couldn’t answer.
“Who is going to come down here and pay $500 to go fishing when all you can catch is four speckled trout, six flounder and one puppy drum?” he asked.
We discussed how the looming June 20 closing of cobia fishing might affect his neck of the woods, and he spent a few well-chosen words characterizing the closure as “totally unnecessary.”
Our flounder are disappearing, and it’s been years since we’ve had enough speckled trout, gray trout or croaker to brag about. Cobia season is closing early. In short, it’s a tough time to be fishing along our coast if you don’t have a big boat capable of getting well off the beach into the ocean.
This is the situation into which Dr. Braxton Davis steps. In mid-April, Davis was named to direct the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries. He probably won’t find it as enjoyable as his previous and current gig as director of the N.C. Division of Coastal Management. He’s going to direct both agencies, with assistant chiefs in place in both divisions.
Davis replaces Dr. Louis Daniel III, who resigned under pressure the last day of February after nine years of trying to manage the state’s saltwater fisheries and make both commercial and recreational fishermen happy. Davis has degrees from universities in three different states along the Atlantic coast, and he ran a program similar to the NCDCM in South Carolina before coming to North Carolina five years ago.
Whether that prepares him for the pressure cooker is a different story. Most of the NCDMF directors who have run the agency in the past 30 years have had all the scientific credentials necessary, and they’ve been swallowed by the politics of the place and spit back out like Jonah, wiser and more than a little bit frazzled.
One of Davis’s first duties should be to clarify the measures taken last fall by the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission when it set out to reduce the harvest of southern flounder. One vote closed the recreational flounder season between Oct. 16 and Jan. 1. The question remains, largely being argued by lawyers, whether or not closing the season to protect southern flounder necessarily closes the season in the ocean for summer flounder, another subspecies that’s not in any danger of being overfished. Plenty of motel reservation and guide trips this fall depend on a decision.
Clearing up some of that muddy water would get Davis at least started off on the right foot. He already knows he needs to watch his step.
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