Netters in end game that they asked for

The premise of the 1950s television show “You Asked For It” was to create stories people wanted to see, such as William Tell shooting the apple off his son’s head or a politician not telling a lie (I made up the second one).

But the phrase once held a different meaning. A fourth-grade buddy of mine once stopped a large bully from daily drubbing me, a first-grader, on the school bus. My friend, in the immortal words of Maryland basketball player Tom Roy, “beat the poodiddly” out of the bully. To the crying, face-down-in-the-bus-parking-lot lout, my guardian said: “Larry, you asked for it.”

I don’t know what made me think of that TV show or the bully. Maybe it was the “intent to file suit” by the N.C. Fisheries Association and Carteret County Fisheries Association. They say state and federal marine-resources managers aren’t being fair to them because state fisheries regulations and Endangered Species Act requirements don’t monitor recreational “takes” of endangered or threatened sea turtles as closely as they watch commercial netters.

The suit is simultaneously serious and laughable. First, incidences of hook-and-line anglers “taking” — hooking a sea turtle, not actually landing one — are about as common as hen’s teeth, compared to turtles snared by nets. Second, they’ve threatened everyone they can think of  — the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, NOAA, N.C. DENR, N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries and N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission). How did aliens from Planet 10 in the Fourth Dimension miss out being on the list?

What’s happening is, we are entering the end game in a long war between those who use this state’s saltwater resources for profit and those who want to protect those resources.

The suit, if filed, will go nowhere. Besides having dubious legal standing — the netters are like the blind waterfowl hunter who shot upward and hoped a duck, goose or maybe an elephant — would fall out of the sky; they’re also similar to minor-league baseball players honkin’ to sue the umpires association for enforcing baseball rules.

What’s really funny is that NCDMF has bent over backward for years to keep netters happy, and the NCWRC administers a tiny fraction of inland waters where a handful of saltwater species conduct spawning runs.

Things didn’t need to go here, but netters fought every small and large proposed change, including four gamefish status bills for specks, red drum and stripers. When that happened, people on the pro-resource side turned to different tactics.

When the sea-turtle lawsuit closed prime inland flounder waters, netters screamed that “environmentalists” would turn their eyes toward them even more. Ya think?

So now NCFA and CCFA flail about with a threat to sue. Guess they never imagined pro-resource folks would find a bigger bully.

Well, they asked for it.