Former NCDMF director deserves credit
Years ago, when I was a newspaper reporter, still looking into the future to my 30th birthday, I wound up covering a minor-league hockey team. It was sort of fun, and it gave me an opportunity to use all my high-school French on the French-Canadian kids.
One of the stories I covered was a dispute between the hockey team and the city that owned the arena in which it played. Something broke down in the building one night, the electricity was off for an extended period of time, and the hockey team lost thousands of dollars of beer and concessions that were in a cooler in a room that was sort of a post-game club for fans.
A lot of charges were thrown back and forth, some of which related to the amount of rent the team was paying compared to other teams in the league. When the story was finally printed, both hockey people and city officials were angry about what I wrote. I mentioned this to somebody else at the newspaper, a grizzled, old veteran, and he said, “When both sides are pissed at you, you’ve probably done a good job.”
That was sort of the way I felt when Dr. Louis Daniel, the director of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, abruptly announced his immediate resignation one afternoon in late February. A lot of recreational fishermen criticized him because he didn’t curb commercial fishing excesses. A lot of commercial fishermen criticized him because he dared to try, albeit without much success. So at the end of the day — and while we don’t know yet why he was NCDMF director one afternoon at 3:30 and gone at 3:45 — we can probably look at his record with the agency and at least wish him a good retirement.
One of the last things Daniel was working on might be one of those birds that comes home to roost pretty soon, a do-do bird, so to speak. NOAA Fisheries, the federal body that governs the management of fisheries outside of state waters and fisheries that involve migratory species, started dropping hints last fall that the number of cobia caught between Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia were way over the allowable recreational catch. In fact, the numbers indicated that North Carolina fishermen caught almost the entire allowable catch for the entire area.
The feds floated rumors that to make up for the overage, the season would have to close early this year, perhaps June 15, virtually wiping out the season along the Outer Banks. Daniel and NCDMF officials were in contact with the feds, trying to work on the problem. When the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission voted to reduce the daily limit to one fish, he privately said he hoped that would get fisherman an extra week. An increase to the minimum size for cobia might get an extra week, he opined. At the end, at least he was trying. We can give him credit for that.
Be the first to comment