If you are a fisherman or hunter in North Carolina, it must seem like the hits just keep on coming. I hate to say it, but I’m going to go ahead and start covering up in anticipation of the next punch.
Last fall, there were plenty. We had a young man try to pass off a set of shed antlers screwed into a different buck’s skull as the state archery record. Then, the state legislature took oversight of deer farms away from the extremely competent N.C. Wildlife Resources and handed it to the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Dumb. Just invite chronic wasting disease into the Old North State.
The last haymaker was a decision in November by the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission that, as part of restrictions adopted to try and save the southern flounder fishery from total destruction at the hands of commercial netters, recreational fishermen were hit with an annual Oct. 16-Jan. 1 closure of the fishery.
Don’t forget, commercial netters take about 79 percent of the total annual catch of southern flounder, and recreational fishermen have had their daily creel limit lowered at least twice and their minimum size increased, so they had already taken a bunch of body blows.
Because southern flounder thrive in coastal waters with lower salinity levels, they aren’t often caught in the ocean, so early reports indicated that perhaps recreational fishermen would still be able to spend the last 10 weeks of every year fishing in the surf for summer flounder, a different sub-species that is more at home in higher-salinity waters and in good shape. Even Dr. Louis Daniel, director of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, indicated he thought that would be the case.
Then, around the first of the year came word that, well, maybe Daniels had spoken too soon. Sources indicated that attorneys with the state aren’t exactly on the same page with the director, or each other, for that matter. There is a legal opinion floating around that since the state is tasked with restricting southern flounder catches in all of the waters it manages — even in the ocean out to 3 miles — that no flounder can come out of the ocean, either.
Another hit came shortly after New Year’s Day with the news that five teen-aged boys had been arrested on various poaching charges when the severed heads and/or bodies of 26 deer, most of them bucks, had been found in the yard and the fields around a Pinetops residence.
I’ve never been able to fathom the mind of a serial poacher, and it’s even tougher to understand how kids between 17 and 19 could be involved in as big a night-hunting/poaching operation as has been alleged. Maybe an Edgecombe County judge will throw a knockout punch this month.
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