SeaDNA wrote:Good point Cap'n Jack, but I don't hunt in popular areas. Most folks don't for the reasons stated. I just see it as yet another incremental attack on our ability to put food on the table in a manner we see fit. There is no best available science to support it.
You say this, yet later you are cool with everything as long as we pay a fee or tax? If divers were paying $200/year in taxes would you be okay with a ban on all GPO harvest across the sound? I suspect you don't really want to go down the road of having policy set by the largest pocketbooks -- that only sounds good when it looks like you can frame the argument so that you're economically winning, its not going to look so good if you wind up in conflict with someone bigger than you. You also might get surprised if some billionnaire liberal decides to save the GPOs, while it turns out not many billionnaires like to hunt them.
You should really be either against hunting bans or not.
Post a sign, or signs, make it an honor system. Based upon my experience with other divers, and seeing the honesty amongst folks here finding lost gear and getting it back to the rightful owner, if you post it, 99.9% will abide by it. Fairly honorable group, wouldn't you agree?
That's what we had going into this mess. It took one diver. 99.9% of divers do not catch GPOs at Cove 2 already.
Going about it as it is sets the stage for future MPA's and junk science.
That is vastly overreaching. The problem here was that you had two groups of divers with two immediately conflicting concerns -- taking pics and vid of a particular octo den in cove 2 vs eating that octo. It didn't have much to do with economics and bring up junk science is a red herring that has nothing to bear on this issue. It wasn't about science, it was about the utilization of a common resource -- good old human conflict. Lots of laws and regulations have no science behind them and are about regulating social conflict.
And there is 1,332 miles of shoreline in puget sound. These regulations affect less than 1% of that. The other >99% of it are open to harvest. If anyone takes a GPO anywhere else its legal now. If anyone takes a GPO at cove 2 in the future, then enforcement is simple and there's no need for any more regulations. You got into the situation that you are most worried about where people who want to ban *all* hunting are showing up and complaining to the government precisely because there were no regulations. With regulations, in the future, this becomes largely a non-issue. If shop owners or other hunters hear divers planning to take octos from cove 2 they can point the divers at the written regulations which will head off conflict, and they can redirect the divers to other sites. If a diver still takes a GPO from cove 2 then they get ticketed by WDFW and is not like you can put cove 2 on a secret double-probation ban, its already banned.