October 27, 2025 • 45 mins
The menhaden commercial fishing industry has been around for over 100 years. Menhaden or "pogies" are a small saltwater fish that are used for a variety of things like fertilizers, animal feed, fish bait, and they are also a huge source of omega3 fatty acid so they are used in making human and animal dietary supplements as well. In this episode we will be diving into the controversy of this industry, specifically off the coast of Louisiana. Over the past few years there have been several questions pop up about the ethics of the practice, and more importantly the long-term impacts it's causing on the fishery and coastal habitats.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. Big shout out to ONEX Hunt for their
support of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm your host, Lake Pickle.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
On this episode, we're headed back down to the brackish
waters of America's Amazon. That's the Gulf for any of
you who may have missed that episode. Only this time
we're setting sail from the Louisiana coast to take a
good look into the minhaden fishing industry, or pogy boats
as they're commonly known, along with the questions surrounding the
amount of byecatch they bring in and the frequent conflicts
(00:38):
they have with recreational fishermen.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Let's dive into it now.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm an Inlander, born and raised where I grew up
and where I currently live. I'm anywhere from three to
four hours to the missis or Louisiana coast, but still
during the summer or early fall months, one of my
favorite things to do is head down there to catch
speckled trout and redfish. Myself and often three to four
friends will load up and make a long weekend out
of it. Which is what you're hearing in the background here.
(01:16):
This clip is from a trip around terry O, Louisiana
with my good friends Jordan Blissit, Jimmy Primo's, my father,
Bobby Pickle, and Travis Lovel with really good charters speckle trout.
Fun to catch, excellent to eat. But me personally, man,
I love hooking into those big bull redfish. These things
will pull and fight you to the point where you'll
(01:38):
be thinking that you have somehow managed to set your
hook into a diesel truck. It's a fight and thrill
that's impossible to forget. But that is just one of
the many crown jewels that make the Louisiana Gulf Coast
what it is. It's the people, it's the scenery, it's
the smell of the air down there, and the bull
trump if you're lucky. There's a reason, or really a
whole lot of reasons that this place has been a
(01:59):
sot out destination for thousands upon thousands of anglers. And
the short clip that I've shared with y'all here is
one of many incredible memories that I've gotten to make
down there. Man, it's such a special place and an
incredible resource. But now I'm gonna share with you a
clip from another fishing trip. I wasn't on this one.
A man named Chris Mcaluso was. And Chris had a
(02:22):
much different experience on his fishing trip than I did.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Here's Chris, Well, we got the Pogy boats out here
right up against the beach.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
They just strung the.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
Per sane net which catches everything that swims, and now
they're pumping the whatever they caught. Pogy's you know, men, aiden, mullet, croakers,
speckled trout, white trout, redfish, whatever got caught in that
net they're pumping. It'll go in the hold, into the hold,
(02:54):
and then the big fish you're gonna get kicked off
to the side, pretty much dead sharks, bull, redfish.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
Or jacks.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
And right now they're pumping the water out of the
hole to make room for more men haden. And all
that water that's coming out of the boat right now
is just no oxygen in it at all.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
They're pumping it here.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
This water's hot, it's shallow, they're pumping it in here,
and when that no oxygen water comes out in here,
it's gonna kill everything there too. So just absolutely no
reason for those boats to be this close to this
beach well and about four feet of water at the most,
and we are, I mean, they're less than one hundred
yards from us right now, about the length of a
football field, and we're twenty five yards off this beach,
(03:33):
so they're less than two hundred yards from this beach,
a beach that, by the way, just got restored, just
got one hundred and twenty million dollars invested in it
to restore it. And you can clearly see this big
boat when he's under power, it's chewing up these sandbars
and chewing up the surf very clearly.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
See that.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
We're gonna hear from Chris later. But before we go
any further, the stage has to be set. Two different
fishing trips off the Louisiana coast that they were conveying
very different experiences. The biggest difference was the presence of
the poggy boat operating close proximity to where Chris was
trying to fish. And we're going to dive off into
that subject, but before we all need to understand just
(04:21):
exactly what these poggy boats or the min haden fishing industry,
as it's more formally known actually is and heads up.
If you're a visual learner like I am, you can
see the video of everything I'm about to describe on
the YouTube version of this episode. Let's dive in the Golf.
Min Hayden perse Sane fishery has existed since the late
(04:43):
eighteen hundreds and is the largest commercial fishing in the
Gulf and the second largest in the United States in
terms of total landings. Landings peaked around one million metric.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Tons in the nineteen eighties and has.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Averaged around half a million metric tons over the last decade.
Over ninety percent of that occurs off the coast of Louisiana.
A Minhagen or a pogi, as the more locally called,
is a small, oily fleshed fish. They're bright silver in
color and have a distinct black spot right behind their
gill opening. They are a flat fish with a deeply
(05:17):
forked tail, and at full maturity they can weigh around
a pound and be about fifteen inches in length, So
a relatively small fish is what we're talking about here.
They can be found in coastal and estuary waters and
they're filter feeders, feeding primarily on plankton. They're also a
very important forage fish to several other predator fish species
such as redfish, kobia, dolphins.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
And many others.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
As far as the role they play for the menhaden
fishing industry, well, they're the life blood of it and
they're harvested for the production of fertilizers, animal feed, fish bait,
fish food, and since they're a huge source of Omega
three fatty acid, menhaden are also used in several human
and animal supplements like fishhole pills for example. And for
(06:01):
the record, I want to put this out early on
at the front of this episode. I fully believe in
telling both sides of every story, regardless of how controversial
or my own personal beliefs or biases. You've reached Abram
Fisheries to the operator, Please press zero.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Thank you for calling it, Blue Empire. You're callings now
being forwarded. Please hold good hearty.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Uh yeah, I need to speak to the operator.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
Please, no one's there today as the plants off today.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Okay, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
So, just for the record, I have tried to get
a representative from the Menhaden fishing industry to talk to me.
I've called, I've sent emails. I even sent Facebook messages
and I was not told no, but I was never
responded to. So if anyone from the men Haden industry
is out there and wants to speak their truth on
this issue.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I am all ears.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Get back to me.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Anyway, Let's get into it. To kick this off, I'm
driving straight to the source. I made a day trip
out of it, and now I'm driving into grandew Louisiana,
a tourist destination for Anglish.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Far and wide.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Wanted to come down here and experience some of the
world renowned inshore fishing that this place offers. The marshy
waters hug up to both sides of the road and
looking out into the distance, I can see several charter
fishing boats. Now to mention, driving past several folks that
are trying their luck fishing off the bank. As I
get into town, the roads are lined with stilt elevated
(07:31):
buildings whose height protects them from high water incidents. This
is a recreational fishing town through and through, and I'm
here to meet a man who has spent his whole
life not only appreciating this place, but has made his
living as a charter fishing guide.
Speaker 6 (07:46):
My name is Keith Bergeron. I've been chartering out of
Grandell for since two thousand and four, twenty one years
going on twenty two. I won't be long. I've been
fishing all my life. There's no white saying like Florida
and Gulf Shores. It's brown saying. It's all natural beaches.
(08:08):
The wildlife is just abundant, and the fishing is extraordinary.
Anybody who's an outdoors person would come here and just
fall in love with this place.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So it was a passion for you, something that you
love to do long before it turned into.
Speaker 6 (08:25):
Well, even as like a kid, I was always amazed
at how somebody could fish for a living, and I
always dreamed about it, I guess you could say, but
never thought I could do it. And I started out
hoping I could do maybe thirty trips a year, ended
up doing like sixty. So the first year was just crazy.
(08:48):
Ever since then, it just it's been booming. I got
more business than I want. I gave a lot of
trips away to other guides because I just wanted to
builds to come here, right even if I'm not fishing them.
You just want to keep the area perpetuated. Yeah, that's
just if they can come here and enjoy theirselves. They'll
(09:09):
come back and hopefully they'll call me again, and if
I'm available, take them.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Keith has a story and perspective that's rooted in love
and appreciation for this place that he calls home, as
well as countless hours spent on the water. I really
think you're going to enjoy hearing it. But before we do,
there's someone else y'all need to meet that shares some
strong similarities with Keith.
Speaker 7 (09:33):
Shane Mayfield and I basically operate from portsalthat of Venice, Louisiana.
I haven't been doing it full time now since ninety six,
so I guess I'm coming up on thirty years. But
I did it before that too, all through college, and
you even a little bit when I was in high
school guiding.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
God, yeah, how'd you get into that?
Speaker 7 (09:54):
Long story short? My dad, he still does, run a
lodge for corporation down in Port Selfur, So that's kind
of how I got into it.
Speaker 4 (10:04):
In high school. You know, I was working.
Speaker 7 (10:05):
I'd worked there in the summers and my off time,
and then i'd take some of their customers help with
when they had groups coming in to go fishing. And
then I did that, you know. And then when I
went to college, I you know, I'd come home on
the weekends and fish and you know, put a little
money in my pocket.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Sure.
Speaker 7 (10:20):
And then I got out of college and I went
to work for a consulting firm. I have an environmental.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Degree, and I just like to fish better.
Speaker 7 (10:27):
So I only worked about a year and a half
and then I quit my job. And I always tell
my customers. When I told my mother I was gonna quit,
she said, you're gonna do what I said. Yeah, I'm
a guide full time. And I say, I wish you'd
taken that blackground skillet and beat me upside the head
with it, because I don't know what I was thinking.
But all joking aside, it's been it's been good to me.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, yeah, see you still like it.
Speaker 7 (10:48):
Like I love taking people fishing. I mean, I done
caught my share. If I never catch another red fish
again in my life, I done caught way more than
most people ever will. So you know, I just like
taking people fishing. It's what I do, and I've been
doing a long time.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Both Keith and Shane are Louisiana natives. If their accents
don't immediately give that away as well as veteran charter
fishing guides, which is a valuable perspective seeing is one
of the big topics in question is the significant amount
of conflicts that seems to be happening between the pogy
boats and charter and recreational fishermen. I want to hear
some of their personal experiences with these pogy boats as
(11:25):
well as their thoughts on them.
Speaker 6 (11:27):
They've always been in this area and it's only certain
times of a year where the pogy really get abundant
on the beach. They start schooling and they might be
laying eggs. I don't know their process of polgi itself,
but I know late summer, when it's hot, we see
a lot more polgy boat action. They're not scared to
(11:49):
get in there and get on the beach and disrupt
the fishermen. They yeah, the pogi boats itself, they're all
about catching them pogies. You know, it don't matter what
it takes who they're going to mess up your fishing spot.
They gone after them pogis. So it got to where
(12:12):
they were catching so many pogies in a drag that
they had a net busted on the beach right here
in front of grand Isle. I don't think they were
very far out, and the net when it ripped, all
those dead pogies were just floating and they all washed
up on the beach in grand Isle. And this is
(12:33):
a tourist place, so the town had to deal with
the stench. And I'm talking about three four feet wide,
six st eight inches deep, just dead fish. So we
had a bad issue here, and grand Isle ended up
creating a buffer zone which was passed by law, where
(12:56):
they had to stay away from Grandal for three at
least three miles away.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
So before that there was no buffers on. They could
come in wherever they wanted to.
Speaker 6 (13:06):
Yeah, that was pretty much free rains.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
How long ago did they pass their buffers on?
Speaker 6 (13:10):
You know, it's been about two years now, so.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Not that long.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
No, Wow, I would have thought it had been. I
was expecting to say, ten to fifteen years ago, something
like that.
Speaker 6 (13:20):
Now, before this, two or three years ago, they were
able to come in as close as they wanted. I mean,
the boats are kicking up sand. That's how shallow they get.
These nets are. I'm gonna just guess and say they
probably fished fifteen feet of water easy. That's how long
(13:40):
they stretched down from the bottom to the surface. So
if you're in eight six eight feet of water or less,
they're catching everything in sight. Everything in that circle is
being trapped in that net.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
It's not just pogies in and up in.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
No, they got speckled trout, they got flounders, redfish in order,
even the bull reds, jack Reville dolphin, and they catching torporen.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
The first talks about making some areas restricted to menhaden
fishing started up in twenty twenty three, However, there was
no formal law put in place until the early part
of twenty twenty four. These laws established a coast wide
buffer zone of one half mile and a one mile
buffer zone at Grand Terry, Elmers Island and Holly Beach,
(14:34):
as well as a three mile buffer zone at Grand Isle.
These buffer zones were put in place due to several factors,
most notably after eighteen separate fish spills accounting for over
two point five million waist in min Hayden and at
least several hundred dead breeding sized redfish. This all occurred
in twenty twenty three alone. Some of these filed up
(14:56):
popular beaches and seemingly increased the number of conflicts between
recreational anglers and boaters with the menhaden boats.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
There was also a.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Significant amount of public outcry from local citizens and sportsmen
about the potential damage that this method of fishing could
be causing to the shallow waters, the fishery, and the habitat.
I want to get Shane's take on this as well.
Speaker 6 (15:19):
I'll say this.
Speaker 7 (15:19):
So, for the first time in thirty years or thirty something,
whatever it was, the LDWF they had done a stock assessment,
the first they had done in a long, long, long time.
And then they got the results and they said, we
got a redfish problem. In other words, we don't have
the numbers we'd like to see. We got to do
something about it. Well, they had meetings and meetings, and
(15:42):
it's always a slow process when you're going through that,
and finally they came up and they recommended, Okay, we're
going to drop it from five reds to four reds.
We're going to go from sixteen to eighteen inch minimum,
nothing over twenty seven inches. So that's what they did
because there was a problem, right, I mean, they've taken
(16:04):
that twenty seven inch fish like used to be. We
could keep one, you know, a recreational anglers and will look,
we never really did keep them. They're not good to eat,
you know. If people want a trophy, I mean, back
in the day, somebody might want to keep one to
mount it. But now you can get a replica. You know,
you measure and girth and take a picture and you
can get a replica that'll last forever. Well, they cut
that out, they said, okay, you can't keep anything over
(16:26):
twenty seven inches, no more for recreational charter anglers, what
have you. Well, yet the poge industry they catch I
don't know. I can't say a definite number. I mean,
I don't know. I'm not on those boats.
Speaker 6 (16:37):
I don't see.
Speaker 7 (16:39):
But it's incomprehensible to say that when I'm drifting through
schools of men Hayden, and on a good day with
three angles on the boat, we'll catch say forty to
fifty of those things or more, you know, And I'm
drifting in a bay boat with popping corks. But when
a boat pulls up with a big persing and that's
a huge school of Hayden that I know bull reds
(17:02):
are in, there's no possible way they can't be catching
them and killing them. I mean, it's just a nature
of that, the way they fish. And if the recreational
angler can't keep any mature redfish because it's supposed to
be bad because of the chaines in the fishery, well,
if they're killing as many as I know they're killing,
it can't be good.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Fascinating stuff from Keith and shame and believe me, we're
not through hearing from these guys. I feel like we're
just getting into the meat of their stories. But I
feel like now is also a crucial time to kick
it back over to Chris Mcaluso. You remember him from
his fishing clip early in the episode with the pogy
boat operating close to him. Chris is the director of
the Center for Marine Fisheries and Mississippi River Program director
(17:47):
for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. He works on conservation
as well as advancing habitat restoration efforts across the Gulf
and improving federal fisheries management law and policy. Chris is
going to give us a more detailed view around the
Menhaden fishing industry and why it's such a cause for concern,
and he's going to accomplish this by telling us about
(18:08):
a first of its kind, comprehensive study on the minhaden
industry that was just published earlier this year. Quick heads up,
you're gonna hear the term by catch. By catch is
unwanted fish or other marine creatures that get caught during
commercial fishing for a different species. So, for example, a
bull of redfish caught in a pogy boat net is
(18:29):
by catch.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Here's Chris.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
There have been studies in the past, they were not
nearly as thorough as the study that was released earlier
this year and was conducted in the twenty twenty four
fishing season. And I think that was part of the
problem is that when fishermen and I know and charterboat
captains you know, were starting to call me, you know,
eight ten years ago in complaining about what they were
(18:52):
seeing from the pogy boats, and it really ramped up
in the last five to six years. We just had
a number of big spill. The boats were just getting
closer and closer to some of these very popular fishing areas,
and people were starting to shoot a lot of video
of it, you know. When we would talk about it
with fisheries regulators, so we would go to Wildlife Fisheries
Commission or talk about it with lawmakers. The data had
(19:15):
big gaps in it, you know, and so you could
draw a lot of different conclusions about just how many
fish from a by catch perspective were being killed, you know.
And the number I would use was, Okay, well, they're
allowed up to five percent of their total volume to
be bycatch, and if they're harvesting a billion pounds of
men hate in a year, well five percent of that's
(19:37):
fifty million pounds of additional dead fish.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
But we didn't know those.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Things for certain, Like we were just putting out the
numbers that were in the previous by catch study, which
had pretty big gaps in it, Like nobody had ever
really estimated how many bull redfish, for instance, were being killed,
how many croaker were being killed, because it was just
it's too difficult for researchers or you know, biologists or
(20:02):
fisheries managers to get down into those nets. They just
didn't have the technology that it took to count all
of the things that were coming onto that boat and
going into the boat and the things that were being
kicked back off. Nobody had taken a nearly as close
a look as was taken last year during that study.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Before Chris dives into the details of this study, allow
me to read to you some of the numbers that
came back as a result. The twenty twenty four bycatch
study of the Industrial Gulf men Haden Fishery indicates the
following approximately twenty two thousand breeding sized redfish, eighty one
million croker, twenty five million sand trout or white trout
(20:45):
as they're commonly known, in forty or more other species,
including black drum, sea trout, cownos rays were all observed
and counted in those poggy nets.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
But yeah, it's just extraordinary when you look at some
of the other numbers they I mean, you know, the
redfish part is what jumps off the page because it's
a game fish. Louisiana recently took action to make it
illegal for recreational fishermen to harvest a bull redfish, Like
you can't kill a twenty seven inch plus redfish anymore.
(21:17):
But twenty two thousand of them were killed according to
the estimate from that study by the min Eiden industry
last year. You know, when I've talked to reporters about
this or I've talked to lawmakers or others about it,
and they say things like, well, but it's just twenty
two thousand. I mean, come on, you guys thought it
was a lot more than that, or the industry is
downplaying that number, and you have to remind them that
(21:39):
it is illegal for anyone else to kill those fish.
It's illegal. What they're doing is illegal for everybody else,
you know. And that's the point that I think can't
be lost here. And the reason it's illegal is because
those fish are important, because the redfish dock in Louisiana
is not nearly as hell healthy as it once was,
(22:01):
and those are the fish that are out there that
have escaped our marshes, escaped the wetlands, get out into
the gulf to lay eggs and make more redfish. And
so that's why those fish were protected. That's why recreational
fishermen in this state for the most part, said we
don't want to kill those fish anymore, because we know
that the recovery time to bring that species that bring
(22:24):
that population back up to a healthy level gets cut
down significantly if we stop killing the ones that are
making the babies. And so what those guys are doing
killing twenty two thousand buwl redfish. That's illegal for everybody else.
And so that's point number one. The other thing is, though,
you got to look at some of the other species
that are being killed, you know, eighty one million crokers.
(22:46):
I mean, the estimate is that literally every time those
guys set a net, they're killing six thousand plus crokers.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
You know.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Not only is that an important forage pace, an important
part of the ecosystem, but crokers are also a fish
that recreational and commercial fishermen like to catch because they're
very good to eat, you know, and that could be
a viable commercial target off of Louisiana's coast for commercial
fishermen that don't have snapper quota or other things.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
They could be catching those crokers.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And there has been a just a stark lack of
bull crokers that folks talk about all the time now.
In the sixties and seventies, when they would go offshore
or they would fish lake, ponch train, et cetera, they'd
catch these two pound crokers.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
They don't really catch them anymore, like it's a huge deal.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
It's almost as big a deal to catch a two
and a half pound croker as it is a twenty
five pound.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
Red snapper two and a half pound. Croakers just aren't
there anymore.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
And maybe one of the reasons they're not there is
because the poke boats are killing eighty one million of
those crokers every single.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
Year, you know. So it was just those kind of
numbers that really jump off the page.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
To twenty five million white trout, five and a half
million white shrimp, you know, millions and millions of mullet
harrying and other things that are out there. You know,
that's all an important part of the ecosystem, and these
things are supposedly being killed by accident, you know. And
another number that not a lot of folks have talked
about are made a big deal of is a two
(24:12):
hundred and forty thousand speckl trout. Well, you know, speckel
trout is one of those fish that generally doesn't get
captured in nets unless it's a gild net. I mean,
they're they're pretty good at getting out of trolls. They're
you know, pretty good at escape and capture, you know,
in these persones. But again, two hundred and forty thousand
speckled trout, I would be willing to bet you that
that if you took ten charter boat captains from Grand Isle,
(24:36):
those ten charter boat captains combined in their careers may
not take customers to kill two hundred and forty thousand
combined speckl trout. If a charter boat captain was taking
four customers to catch a limit of speckl trout, and
again a limit of trout now.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Per person in Louisiana's fifteen per day, it's still a
lot of fish.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You'd have to do that four thousand times to equal
to one hundred and forty thousand spec wul trial. There's
just not a lot of charter boat captains who are
going to do that. I mean, that's the kind of
numbers we're talking about, because that's the volume at which
this vicuery operates.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
We know the Menhaden industry has been around for over
a century, the late eighteen hundreds to be more specific.
So why has the conflict around this operation seemed to
have such a significant spike in these recent years.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I think what has stood out to people in the
last decade or so in terms of the change that
people have seen in terms of their interactions with the boats,
is that they went from being domestically owned companies to
foreign controlled companies that didn't really take the same perspective
(25:57):
when it came to how they approach the fishery that
they had when they were domestically owned fisheries.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
And that's not me making this up.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
I mean that's reflected in some of the data that
we see that in the last ten years a lot
more of the harvest has come closer to shore than
it used to. And then you know, hearing from fisheries
regulators in Louisiana who've told me off the record on
the side, you know, there was a time where if
we were getting a lot of conflicts and people were
complaining about dead fish or bycatch. You know, if they
(26:28):
complained to say the Department of Wildlife Fisheries, the department
would call the pokey companies and say, hey, y'all might
need to back off a little bit. But those things
stop happening. You know, if you're a lawmaker who's from
North Louisiana, or you're you know, a member of Congress
or whatever, you know, you look at commercial fisheries and
you say, well, you know, these guys are operating very
(26:48):
close to the margins and this is a small operation.
That's not the case. These are not mom and pop crabbers.
This is not a sole proprietor shrimp or anything like that.
I mean, this is a large industrial activity and they
harvest and kill things on an industrial scale, and so you.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
Got to look at it like that. It's not a
mom and pop shripping operation.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
It's a very large, internationally owned, industrial scale fishing operation.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
They got spot or planes that are telling these pogy
boats where to go. They got planes in the air
flying and they give them coordinaces. The boat goes straight
to that spot. They encompass that whole area with that
net and whatever's in that net. When they pulling that
net in, the pogies regurgitate and they put off the
(27:38):
slime off their skin. That's just it makes the water
like a slurry. It's real thick and it's nasty. So
all of these fish that are in that net with
the pogies are breathing that stuff in and it's clogging
up their gills and they can't get oxident and that's
why they're dying. So they they have the hose with
(28:02):
the big cage on the end that only allows smaller
fish in. So when they released all the rest of
the fish that are in there, they dead. This last
instance we had was about two or three weeks ago.
I got a call on a Monday. It said they
were right there on the beach, right here in front
(28:24):
of grand Isle. And I got another phone call from
a guy on Wednesday morning because I went. I went
out Wednesday morning in my boat. We went to fish
Tripletail out towards the mouth of the river, and on
the way back, I got a call from a guide
that said grand Ale Beach has hundreds of bullreds dead
(28:46):
on the beach. So we were coming back from the
mouth of the river and I saw at least fourteen
poge boats in for a baya, which is just easter
here over. They were all together in this one area,
so we went straight over there. So I got some
(29:08):
pictures of some dead redfish floating. And then the Wednesday
is when all of redfish were on the beach. I
got pictures all that Wednesday afternoon Thursday, I got in
my boat and I went to the islands east of
grand Isle, which is only accessible by a boat, and
I have forty pictures over there of dead bullreds. So
(29:33):
all of those bull reds they captured in the nets
on Monday were all dead and floated against the beach,
and that's the only ones I could find. There was
probably more than that. Redfish don't have babies until they
over twenty seven inches the ones that they're killing. There
wasn't one dead red fish out of the one hundred
(29:54):
forty pictures I got that was under twenty seven inches.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
So they're killing all breeding SIZEA.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
Yes, killing all the ones having the babies, but yet
they've stopped the recreational guy from keeping our catching them
at all.
Speaker 8 (30:22):
Thank you for calling day Brook Fishery.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
If you know your party's extension, you may vale with
at any time.
Speaker 8 (30:27):
Tell me the voicemail that's one after good Chown. Hey,
my name is Lake. I produce a podcast called Backwoods
University for the media or podcast network. I'm calling to
inquire and see if someone from your organization would be
open to doing a quick interview. I have a flexible
schedule and I could do these interviews digitally, so please
(30:48):
let me know if anyone from your organization be willing
to talk with me, and I would love to talk
with you. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I'm going to put this out there again if anyone
from the men hay and fishing industry is willing to
share their side of this story by all means get
back with me. However, I think we can all agree
that everything we have heard so far is some moving information.
What I'm curious about now is what do we do
with it? Where do we go from here.
Speaker 7 (31:18):
I'll preface this by saying I don't want anybody to
lose their jobs. You know, there's a lot of things
we've done in wildlife and fisheries over the years that
we used to do that we can't do anymore because
they realize they ain't good for the environment. It ain't
good for the fisheries, ain't good for the wildlight, what
have you. So, I think that's kind of where we're
(31:41):
going with this. I mean, they've outlawed it pretty much
everywhere else in the country except for small way. It's
not nowhere near the large scale, industrial scale they have
here in Louisiana. They have a I think it's a
half mile buffer zone off of Placamus Parish, which look
half mile is not that far. No, let me tell
(32:03):
you if it was three miles, we would never have conflicts.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
See, that's what's interesting is so, I mean I was interviewed.
I interviewed a guy in grandal to day and uh,
you know, I was just trying to get honest answers.
And I said, man, if you could have a magic
wand and you can, you can make the laws, you
can wave magic wand what would you do. I thought
he was going to say, I'd make the whole thing
go away. Yeah, And he said, I just wish they'd
(32:27):
stay at their three miles buffers on.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
Three miles in front of grand Isle is great. I
don't know why it's not three miles all along the coasts.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
So you think they're there, there could potentially be a
way for them to find a way for everybody can work.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Like, you don't.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Necessarily have to shut the poge boats down, they just
need to move out further.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Is that what you're saying.
Speaker 6 (32:50):
Yeah, I don't have a problem when the pogie boats
work and just not killing everything inside, right, and they
and they're probably still going to have have some by
catch being that for out, but at least it's not
on the beach where they're killing all the spectacled trout,
the croakers, all the smaller fish that can't go out
(33:12):
in that deep water because they're gonna get eaten. They
on that beach because that's their protection and that's where
they thrive at. So yeah, if the pogi boats were
further out, and I know what they're gonna say, the
polgive industry is gonna say, they can't catch nothing out
that far. I don't know what else to tell you.
(33:35):
We're the only state that allows this practice to continue.
Speaker 7 (33:40):
If you push them out further, you would never have
that conflict because I'm gonna tell you, we don't never
drift out three miles, right, never, never, never, never. Now
how it impacts their fishery, I mean, I can't say that.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
I don't know.
Speaker 7 (33:55):
I don't know, but I do know if they were
outside of three miles, they are off a grand isle,
this would be a moot point. Now they ain't gonna
be good enough for some people, But you know what,
I'm willing to give something, yeah, or they willing to
give something.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Compromise, Yeah, compromise.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I just man, I feel like and this is I
haven't been able to talk to anybody on the men
Haden fishery side. I honestly just for the just for
the sake of having a balanced journalism, I would try
to talk to one of them, but I haven't been
able to do that. But everything that I'm pointing to
that that I can gather it points to this needs
to be looked at just from a ecological standpoint and
(34:35):
for the health of the fishery. It's like it seems
to be folks need to take a closer look at this.
And two, understand the men and haden industry. I understand
there's jobs there. Understand that. Yeah, also understand how much
tourism dollars and big the businesses for charter guide service.
Speaker 7 (34:54):
Well okay, and not to cut you off, but that
is therein lies a big problem because look, you know,
the commercial fishing has always butted heads with recreational that
is wherever you go, you know, and look, there's there's
sometimes as a disconnect. You know, people don't don't realize that,
you know that what's what's going on out there is
(35:16):
that they don't see it. Most of my people from
out of town, so not only did they pay my
rate that I charge, but they're staying at a bed
and breakfast and right the import selfer, you know, they're
traveling through. We stopped at the local grocery store because
they needed to get something. We came back from fishing.
They went, they lunch yesterday when they got in earliest
(35:37):
that when they lunch at the small restaurant, right the
import selfer. So it's not only my fee, my rate
I'm charging per day, but it's the lodges, it's the stores,
and we're bringing all these people in. What how much
are the men Hagen boats? How many people are coming
in on the men Who's day? None of those guys
(35:58):
are coming in and stay ain't at lodges and all that. Yeah,
you know, the boats are buying food maybe from a
local vendor. But as far as people actually come in
and going down those guys going to Venice Marina or
going to Cypruss Cove or going to the you know
this lodge or that lord, they ain't doing that. And
(36:18):
our guys are that. You know, we're a small parish.
We don't have the oil industry like we used to have,
commercial fishing, edting like it used to be. So you know,
they pay property taxes and I mean so you know
they've been around, They've been around a long time, so
people want to protect it.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
And I get that. I get that, Like I said, I.
Speaker 7 (36:37):
Don't want anybody to lose their job, But I say,
what about me? I mean, what about what I do?
What about people coming from all over the country. I'd
say ninety percent of my people are coming from the
way out. It's an economic impact that I'm going to
tell you. If you didn't have that for a lot
of these small coastal communities, they wouldn't be It'd be
a ghost.
Speaker 8 (36:57):
Have that.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Yeah, I think it's a lot about the character of
these men that the solution that they're seeking here is
really just an even playing field for both sides. I
mean really, after the stories that they share, and honestly,
some of them didn't even make it endo the episode
due to time constraints, I thought for sure that they
would be wanting to put an end to menhaden fishing outright,
(37:20):
But they didn't. They recognized that this industry is how
some folks make their living and support their families. They
realize that this industry has an economic impact. I'm going
to share my own opinion here, but based off of
the information that I have right now, I think that
what these guys are asking for is reasonable. They want
to take a closer look at the fishing industry, the methods,
(37:42):
the bycatch, the conflict between recreational and charter fishermen. Is
there a way that they can find more common ground.
Is there ways to continue harvesting men haden and it
be more sustainable with less bycatch and less harm done
to the habitat. These questions are not outlandish, and I
think worth being asked, and more importantly, I think they're
(38:03):
worth finding an answer to.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
We really weren't ever pushing or haven't ever been pushing
to eliminate the men hate in the industry. But what
we wanted to do was find a way that they
can continue to operate, but to protect some of those
more sensitive habitats that we knew were being damaged by
those nets and by those boats making contact with the
water bottom and getting, you know, very very close to
(38:28):
our beaches. I mean, I've seen pokey boats setting nets
in water that was four and a half to five
feet deep. You know, these boats draft ten feet at
least nine feet maybe at a minimum when they're empty,
which means I have watched them plow through the water bottom.
You know, I've watched them dig up the sand and
(38:51):
dig up the sandbars to get the boat into where
they were harvesting the fish. And I know that that
persane is making an enormous amount of contact on that
water bottom. I see the amount of sediment that's being
stirred up. And the fact is there's not a biologist
who would argue against this, but that you know, the
majority of your biomass, you know, in a coastal situation,
(39:14):
happens in that area that's within a mile or two
of the beach. That's just where most of your species
are going to be. You know, there was a conservation
element to moving the boats into a little bit deeper water,
and it was that by not having those nets all
over the bottom of the water, you were going to
reduce potentially the volume of bycatch, but also reduce the
(39:38):
number of species that were being impacted, and you were
going to keep that water bottom more intact. And this
is something I think we've seen born out in that
by catch study. You know, as you move into deeper water,
the number of species impacted go down, the volume of
bycatch goes down, and so there is a conservation value
to moving those boats into deeper water. You know, it'd
(40:00):
be nice for them to make some concessions here and there,
that a little bit of conservation goes a long way,
not just from a public relations perspective, but just from
the value of our resource. You know, Let's say you
went to the Prairie Pothole region, right and you told
the duck hunters up there that there was this industry
that was going to employ a few hundred people. It
was going to have some economic impact on the communities,
(40:23):
it was going.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
To provide some jobs.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
The trade off there is going to be we're going
to have to kill thirty thousand specklebelly geese, about two
hundred and fifty thousand blueing teal and mallards, and about
one hundred thousand mourning doves or a hundred million mourning doves.
You guys cool with that? Nobody would be cool with that.
Nobody would be cool with that, and no politician would
(40:49):
back that, you know, nobody would put their name to that.
And yet that's in essence what's happening here. I mean,
that's sort of the level that we're dealing with. I mean,
red fish in Louisiana or a game fish.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
And the bottom.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
Line is it's not okay for those guys to be
killing those fish. It's not because it's not okay for
anybody else to be killing them.
Speaker 7 (41:12):
I wish I had more education on the actual industry itself,
as far as you know why going out deeper would
affect their profit margin or.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
What would it? What would it? What would it?
Speaker 7 (41:24):
What would them being out three miles statewide due to
their bottom line or their business? And I'm sure when
people on the other side are listening to this, they're
gonna be saying, yeah, you don't know, you don't know. No,
I don't, but tell me and let me know. But still,
can we meet? Can you know, let's let's find a
let's find a meeting place. I would say, hey, if
(41:45):
you see boats over there, just don't go buy them.
What I'm doing is sustainable, yeah, because I ain't keeping nothing.
I'm throwing them all back. Does a fish die and
every now and then maybe, but I mean we we
fight them, we unhook them, you know, every now and
then you might have one that's hooked.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
Deep it bleeds a little bit, but that is like
very rare, rare, you know.
Speaker 7 (42:05):
So I can say without a shadow doubt that what
I'm doing is sustainable and it can and if you
protect the fishery, what I'm doing. You can do this forever.
You know, if you keep on keeping on the way,
we're losing habitat. Eventually all that large scale industrial fishing
that's gonna be done.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
I'll tell you one thing. For my separate conversations with Keith,
Shane and Chris, all of them have an undeniable appreciation
for the Louisiana coast. It comes from a place of
authenticity and I respect it.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
It's impossible not to.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Before we wrap this up, I want to hear some
final thoughts from both Chris and Keith about what they
think and hope for the future of the Menhaden fishing industry.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
You know, my primary focus at TRCP has always been habitat,
habitat restoration and the Mississippi River basin, especially focused in Louisiana,
and it's a top two to three priority for our
center in particular, and it's a priority for our board
and for the organization, and it will continue to be
because I think there is a path. It's difficult to
(43:13):
see it right now, but there is a path to
not only better conservation in the Atlantic Basin when it
comes to men Ain't fishing, but also in the Gulf.
Speaker 6 (43:22):
I'm opening as many eyes as I can to this
right now. I'm hoping that something gets done. I mean,
that's all I can do is try. If I don't
succeed doing this, I'm just gonna throw my hands up
and say we can't do nothing about it. You know,
that's all you can do.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, well, I hope something does change.
Speaker 6 (43:45):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
For every probably I'll say.
Speaker 6 (43:48):
It's not me. It's not about me. It's about the
kids coming up, you know, families coming down here to
enjoy ourselves and catch fish. In the future, I'll be
long gone. People will still be fishing. Yeah, and if
(44:08):
you keep wiping them out, then I will be here.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Regardless of where you fall on this issue, Hopefully we
can all agree on wanting a healthy and sustainable fishery
and coastal habitat in the future. The question is how
do we get there? What do y'all think. If there's
one thing I am confident in, it's that we should
never be afraid to ask questions. I want to thank
(44:39):
all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well
as Bear Grease and this country life. I mean, really,
the warm welcome that all of you have given me
to this bear grease podcast. Feed means a whole lot
and I appreciate it. And hey, if you liked this episode,
share it with either the worst or best angler you
have in your contact list. Only don't tell them what
(44:59):
you that's one they are.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
Leave them guessing.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
And also be sure to check out Blood Trails, the
newest podcast addition to the Meat Eater Network. This is
the true crime genre and hunting and fishing world Colliding,
hosted by writer and journalist Jordan Sillers. You will hear
everything from missing hunters, poachers turned killers, and fishing trips
gone fatally wrong. It is a fascinating podcast that you
(45:23):
will not want to miss in the first episode premiere's Thursday,
October thirtieth. Be sure to check that out and subscribe
to it so that you'll be notified when the first
episode drops. I'm telling you this is gonna be good.
And stick around here because if this podcast was an
inshore fishing trip, we haven't even made it out of
the no wake zone yet. We're just getting started. There's
(45:44):
a whole lot more on the way.
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. Big shout out to ONEX Hunt for their
support of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I'm your host, Lake Pickle.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
On this episode, we're headed back down to the brackish
waters of America's Amazon. That's the Gulf for any of
you who may have missed that episode. Only this time
we're setting sail from the Louisiana coast to take a
good look into the minhaden fishing industry, or pogy boats
as they're commonly known, along with the questions surrounding the
amount of byecatch they bring in and the frequent conflicts
(00:38):
they have with recreational fishermen.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Let's dive into it now.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm an Inlander, born and raised where I grew up
and where I currently live. I'm anywhere from three to
four hours to the missis or Louisiana coast, but still
during the summer or early fall months, one of my
favorite things to do is head down there to catch
speckled trout and redfish. Myself and often three to four
friends will load up and make a long weekend out
of it. Which is what you're hearing in the background here.
(01:16):
This clip is from a trip around terry O, Louisiana
with my good friends Jordan Blissit, Jimmy Primo's, my father,
Bobby Pickle, and Travis Lovel with really good charters speckle trout.
Fun to catch, excellent to eat. But me personally, man,
I love hooking into those big bull redfish. These things
will pull and fight you to the point where you'll
(01:38):
be thinking that you have somehow managed to set your
hook into a diesel truck. It's a fight and thrill
that's impossible to forget. But that is just one of
the many crown jewels that make the Louisiana Gulf Coast
what it is. It's the people, it's the scenery, it's
the smell of the air down there, and the bull
trump if you're lucky. There's a reason, or really a
whole lot of reasons that this place has been a
(01:59):
sot out destination for thousands upon thousands of anglers. And
the short clip that I've shared with y'all here is
one of many incredible memories that I've gotten to make
down there. Man, it's such a special place and an
incredible resource. But now I'm gonna share with you a
clip from another fishing trip. I wasn't on this one.
A man named Chris Mcaluso was. And Chris had a
(02:22):
much different experience on his fishing trip than I did.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Here's Chris, Well, we got the Pogy boats out here
right up against the beach.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
They just strung the.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
Per sane net which catches everything that swims, and now
they're pumping the whatever they caught. Pogy's you know, men, aiden, mullet, croakers,
speckled trout, white trout, redfish, whatever got caught in that
net they're pumping. It'll go in the hold, into the hold,
(02:54):
and then the big fish you're gonna get kicked off
to the side, pretty much dead sharks, bull, redfish.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
Or jacks.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
And right now they're pumping the water out of the
hole to make room for more men haden. And all
that water that's coming out of the boat right now
is just no oxygen in it at all.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
They're pumping it here.
Speaker 5 (03:11):
This water's hot, it's shallow, they're pumping it in here,
and when that no oxygen water comes out in here,
it's gonna kill everything there too. So just absolutely no
reason for those boats to be this close to this
beach well and about four feet of water at the most,
and we are, I mean, they're less than one hundred
yards from us right now, about the length of a
football field, and we're twenty five yards off this beach,
(03:33):
so they're less than two hundred yards from this beach,
a beach that, by the way, just got restored, just
got one hundred and twenty million dollars invested in it
to restore it. And you can clearly see this big
boat when he's under power, it's chewing up these sandbars
and chewing up the surf very clearly.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
See that.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
We're gonna hear from Chris later. But before we go
any further, the stage has to be set. Two different
fishing trips off the Louisiana coast that they were conveying
very different experiences. The biggest difference was the presence of
the poggy boat operating close proximity to where Chris was
trying to fish. And we're going to dive off into
that subject, but before we all need to understand just
(04:21):
exactly what these poggy boats or the min haden fishing industry,
as it's more formally known actually is and heads up.
If you're a visual learner like I am, you can
see the video of everything I'm about to describe on
the YouTube version of this episode. Let's dive in the Golf.
Min Hayden perse Sane fishery has existed since the late
(04:43):
eighteen hundreds and is the largest commercial fishing in the
Gulf and the second largest in the United States in
terms of total landings. Landings peaked around one million metric.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Tons in the nineteen eighties and has.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Averaged around half a million metric tons over the last decade.
Over ninety percent of that occurs off the coast of Louisiana.
A Minhagen or a pogi, as the more locally called,
is a small, oily fleshed fish. They're bright silver in
color and have a distinct black spot right behind their
gill opening. They are a flat fish with a deeply
(05:17):
forked tail, and at full maturity they can weigh around
a pound and be about fifteen inches in length, So
a relatively small fish is what we're talking about here.
They can be found in coastal and estuary waters and
they're filter feeders, feeding primarily on plankton. They're also a
very important forage fish to several other predator fish species
such as redfish, kobia, dolphins.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
And many others.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
As far as the role they play for the menhaden
fishing industry, well, they're the life blood of it and
they're harvested for the production of fertilizers, animal feed, fish bait,
fish food, and since they're a huge source of Omega
three fatty acid, menhaden are also used in several human
and animal supplements like fishhole pills for example. And for
(06:01):
the record, I want to put this out early on
at the front of this episode. I fully believe in
telling both sides of every story, regardless of how controversial
or my own personal beliefs or biases. You've reached Abram
Fisheries to the operator, Please press zero.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Thank you for calling it, Blue Empire. You're callings now
being forwarded. Please hold good hearty.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Uh yeah, I need to speak to the operator.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
Please, no one's there today as the plants off today.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Okay, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
So, just for the record, I have tried to get
a representative from the Menhaden fishing industry to talk to me.
I've called, I've sent emails. I even sent Facebook messages
and I was not told no, but I was never
responded to. So if anyone from the men Haden industry
is out there and wants to speak their truth on
this issue.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I am all ears.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Get back to me.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Anyway, Let's get into it. To kick this off, I'm
driving straight to the source. I made a day trip
out of it, and now I'm driving into grandew Louisiana,
a tourist destination for Anglish.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Far and wide.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Wanted to come down here and experience some of the
world renowned inshore fishing that this place offers. The marshy
waters hug up to both sides of the road and
looking out into the distance, I can see several charter
fishing boats. Now to mention, driving past several folks that
are trying their luck fishing off the bank. As I
get into town, the roads are lined with stilt elevated
(07:31):
buildings whose height protects them from high water incidents. This
is a recreational fishing town through and through, and I'm
here to meet a man who has spent his whole
life not only appreciating this place, but has made his
living as a charter fishing guide.
Speaker 6 (07:46):
My name is Keith Bergeron. I've been chartering out of
Grandell for since two thousand and four, twenty one years
going on twenty two. I won't be long. I've been
fishing all my life. There's no white saying like Florida
and Gulf Shores. It's brown saying. It's all natural beaches.
(08:08):
The wildlife is just abundant, and the fishing is extraordinary.
Anybody who's an outdoors person would come here and just
fall in love with this place.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So it was a passion for you, something that you
love to do long before it turned into.
Speaker 6 (08:25):
Well, even as like a kid, I was always amazed
at how somebody could fish for a living, and I
always dreamed about it, I guess you could say, but
never thought I could do it. And I started out
hoping I could do maybe thirty trips a year, ended
up doing like sixty. So the first year was just crazy.
(08:48):
Ever since then, it just it's been booming. I got
more business than I want. I gave a lot of
trips away to other guides because I just wanted to
builds to come here, right even if I'm not fishing them.
You just want to keep the area perpetuated. Yeah, that's
just if they can come here and enjoy theirselves. They'll
(09:09):
come back and hopefully they'll call me again, and if
I'm available, take them.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Keith has a story and perspective that's rooted in love
and appreciation for this place that he calls home, as
well as countless hours spent on the water. I really
think you're going to enjoy hearing it. But before we do,
there's someone else y'all need to meet that shares some
strong similarities with Keith.
Speaker 7 (09:33):
Shane Mayfield and I basically operate from portsalthat of Venice, Louisiana.
I haven't been doing it full time now since ninety six,
so I guess I'm coming up on thirty years. But
I did it before that too, all through college, and
you even a little bit when I was in high
school guiding.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
God, yeah, how'd you get into that?
Speaker 7 (09:54):
Long story short? My dad, he still does, run a
lodge for corporation down in Port Selfur, So that's kind
of how I got into it.
Speaker 4 (10:04):
In high school. You know, I was working.
Speaker 7 (10:05):
I'd worked there in the summers and my off time,
and then i'd take some of their customers help with
when they had groups coming in to go fishing. And
then I did that, you know. And then when I
went to college, I you know, I'd come home on
the weekends and fish and you know, put a little
money in my pocket.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Sure.
Speaker 7 (10:20):
And then I got out of college and I went
to work for a consulting firm. I have an environmental.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Degree, and I just like to fish better.
Speaker 7 (10:27):
So I only worked about a year and a half
and then I quit my job. And I always tell
my customers. When I told my mother I was gonna quit,
she said, you're gonna do what I said. Yeah, I'm
a guide full time. And I say, I wish you'd
taken that blackground skillet and beat me upside the head
with it, because I don't know what I was thinking.
But all joking aside, it's been it's been good to me.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, yeah, see you still like it.
Speaker 7 (10:48):
Like I love taking people fishing. I mean, I done
caught my share. If I never catch another red fish
again in my life, I done caught way more than
most people ever will. So you know, I just like
taking people fishing. It's what I do, and I've been
doing a long time.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Both Keith and Shane are Louisiana natives. If their accents
don't immediately give that away as well as veteran charter
fishing guides, which is a valuable perspective seeing is one
of the big topics in question is the significant amount
of conflicts that seems to be happening between the pogy
boats and charter and recreational fishermen. I want to hear
some of their personal experiences with these pogy boats as
(11:25):
well as their thoughts on them.
Speaker 6 (11:27):
They've always been in this area and it's only certain
times of a year where the pogy really get abundant
on the beach. They start schooling and they might be
laying eggs. I don't know their process of polgi itself,
but I know late summer, when it's hot, we see
a lot more polgy boat action. They're not scared to
(11:49):
get in there and get on the beach and disrupt
the fishermen. They yeah, the pogi boats itself, they're all
about catching them pogies. You know, it don't matter what
it takes who they're going to mess up your fishing spot.
They gone after them pogis. So it got to where
(12:12):
they were catching so many pogies in a drag that
they had a net busted on the beach right here
in front of grand Isle. I don't think they were
very far out, and the net when it ripped, all
those dead pogies were just floating and they all washed
up on the beach in grand Isle. And this is
(12:33):
a tourist place, so the town had to deal with
the stench. And I'm talking about three four feet wide,
six st eight inches deep, just dead fish. So we
had a bad issue here, and grand Isle ended up
creating a buffer zone which was passed by law, where
(12:56):
they had to stay away from Grandal for three at
least three miles away.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
So before that there was no buffers on. They could
come in wherever they wanted to.
Speaker 6 (13:06):
Yeah, that was pretty much free rains.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
How long ago did they pass their buffers on?
Speaker 6 (13:10):
You know, it's been about two years now, so.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
Not that long.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
No, Wow, I would have thought it had been. I
was expecting to say, ten to fifteen years ago, something
like that.
Speaker 6 (13:20):
Now, before this, two or three years ago, they were
able to come in as close as they wanted. I mean,
the boats are kicking up sand. That's how shallow they get.
These nets are. I'm gonna just guess and say they
probably fished fifteen feet of water easy. That's how long
(13:40):
they stretched down from the bottom to the surface. So
if you're in eight six eight feet of water or less,
they're catching everything in sight. Everything in that circle is
being trapped in that net.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
It's not just pogies in and up in.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
No, they got speckled trout, they got flounders, redfish in order,
even the bull reds, jack Reville dolphin, and they catching torporen.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
The first talks about making some areas restricted to menhaden
fishing started up in twenty twenty three, However, there was
no formal law put in place until the early part
of twenty twenty four. These laws established a coast wide
buffer zone of one half mile and a one mile
buffer zone at Grand Terry, Elmers Island and Holly Beach,
(14:34):
as well as a three mile buffer zone at Grand Isle.
These buffer zones were put in place due to several factors,
most notably after eighteen separate fish spills accounting for over
two point five million waist in min Hayden and at
least several hundred dead breeding sized redfish. This all occurred
in twenty twenty three alone. Some of these filed up
(14:56):
popular beaches and seemingly increased the number of conflicts between
recreational anglers and boaters with the menhaden boats.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
There was also a.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Significant amount of public outcry from local citizens and sportsmen
about the potential damage that this method of fishing could
be causing to the shallow waters, the fishery, and the habitat.
I want to get Shane's take on this as well.
Speaker 6 (15:19):
I'll say this.
Speaker 7 (15:19):
So, for the first time in thirty years or thirty something,
whatever it was, the LDWF they had done a stock assessment,
the first they had done in a long, long, long time.
And then they got the results and they said, we
got a redfish problem. In other words, we don't have
the numbers we'd like to see. We got to do
something about it. Well, they had meetings and meetings, and
(15:42):
it's always a slow process when you're going through that,
and finally they came up and they recommended, Okay, we're
going to drop it from five reds to four reds.
We're going to go from sixteen to eighteen inch minimum,
nothing over twenty seven inches. So that's what they did
because there was a problem, right, I mean, they've taken
(16:04):
that twenty seven inch fish like used to be. We
could keep one, you know, a recreational anglers and will look,
we never really did keep them. They're not good to eat,
you know. If people want a trophy, I mean, back
in the day, somebody might want to keep one to
mount it. But now you can get a replica. You know,
you measure and girth and take a picture and you
can get a replica that'll last forever. Well, they cut
that out, they said, okay, you can't keep anything over
(16:26):
twenty seven inches, no more for recreational charter anglers, what
have you. Well, yet the poge industry they catch I
don't know. I can't say a definite number. I mean,
I don't know. I'm not on those boats.
Speaker 6 (16:37):
I don't see.
Speaker 7 (16:39):
But it's incomprehensible to say that when I'm drifting through
schools of men Hayden, and on a good day with
three angles on the boat, we'll catch say forty to
fifty of those things or more, you know, And I'm
drifting in a bay boat with popping corks. But when
a boat pulls up with a big persing and that's
a huge school of Hayden that I know bull reds
(17:02):
are in, there's no possible way they can't be catching
them and killing them. I mean, it's just a nature
of that, the way they fish. And if the recreational
angler can't keep any mature redfish because it's supposed to
be bad because of the chaines in the fishery, well,
if they're killing as many as I know they're killing,
it can't be good.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Fascinating stuff from Keith and shame and believe me, we're
not through hearing from these guys. I feel like we're
just getting into the meat of their stories. But I
feel like now is also a crucial time to kick
it back over to Chris Mcaluso. You remember him from
his fishing clip early in the episode with the pogy
boat operating close to him. Chris is the director of
the Center for Marine Fisheries and Mississippi River Program director
(17:47):
for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. He works on conservation
as well as advancing habitat restoration efforts across the Gulf
and improving federal fisheries management law and policy. Chris is
going to give us a more detailed view around the
Menhaden fishing industry and why it's such a cause for concern,
and he's going to accomplish this by telling us about
(18:08):
a first of its kind, comprehensive study on the minhaden
industry that was just published earlier this year. Quick heads up,
you're gonna hear the term by catch. By catch is
unwanted fish or other marine creatures that get caught during
commercial fishing for a different species. So, for example, a
bull of redfish caught in a pogy boat net is
(18:29):
by catch.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Here's Chris.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
There have been studies in the past, they were not
nearly as thorough as the study that was released earlier
this year and was conducted in the twenty twenty four
fishing season. And I think that was part of the
problem is that when fishermen and I know and charterboat
captains you know, were starting to call me, you know,
eight ten years ago in complaining about what they were
(18:52):
seeing from the pogy boats, and it really ramped up
in the last five to six years. We just had
a number of big spill. The boats were just getting
closer and closer to some of these very popular fishing areas,
and people were starting to shoot a lot of video
of it, you know. When we would talk about it
with fisheries regulators, so we would go to Wildlife Fisheries
Commission or talk about it with lawmakers. The data had
(19:15):
big gaps in it, you know, and so you could
draw a lot of different conclusions about just how many
fish from a by catch perspective were being killed, you know.
And the number I would use was, Okay, well, they're
allowed up to five percent of their total volume to
be bycatch, and if they're harvesting a billion pounds of
men hate in a year, well five percent of that's
(19:37):
fifty million pounds of additional dead fish.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
But we didn't know those.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Things for certain, Like we were just putting out the
numbers that were in the previous by catch study, which
had pretty big gaps in it, Like nobody had ever
really estimated how many bull redfish, for instance, were being killed,
how many croaker were being killed, because it was just
it's too difficult for researchers or you know, biologists or
(20:02):
fisheries managers to get down into those nets. They just
didn't have the technology that it took to count all
of the things that were coming onto that boat and
going into the boat and the things that were being
kicked back off. Nobody had taken a nearly as close
a look as was taken last year during that study.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Before Chris dives into the details of this study, allow
me to read to you some of the numbers that
came back as a result. The twenty twenty four bycatch
study of the Industrial Gulf men Haden Fishery indicates the
following approximately twenty two thousand breeding sized redfish, eighty one
million croker, twenty five million sand trout or white trout
(20:45):
as they're commonly known, in forty or more other species,
including black drum, sea trout, cownos rays were all observed
and counted in those poggy nets.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
But yeah, it's just extraordinary when you look at some
of the other numbers they I mean, you know, the
redfish part is what jumps off the page because it's
a game fish. Louisiana recently took action to make it
illegal for recreational fishermen to harvest a bull redfish, Like
you can't kill a twenty seven inch plus redfish anymore.
(21:17):
But twenty two thousand of them were killed according to
the estimate from that study by the min Eiden industry
last year. You know, when I've talked to reporters about
this or I've talked to lawmakers or others about it,
and they say things like, well, but it's just twenty
two thousand. I mean, come on, you guys thought it
was a lot more than that, or the industry is
downplaying that number, and you have to remind them that
(21:39):
it is illegal for anyone else to kill those fish.
It's illegal. What they're doing is illegal for everybody else,
you know. And that's the point that I think can't
be lost here. And the reason it's illegal is because
those fish are important, because the redfish dock in Louisiana
is not nearly as hell healthy as it once was,
(22:01):
and those are the fish that are out there that
have escaped our marshes, escaped the wetlands, get out into
the gulf to lay eggs and make more redfish. And
so that's why those fish were protected. That's why recreational
fishermen in this state for the most part, said we
don't want to kill those fish anymore, because we know
that the recovery time to bring that species that bring
(22:24):
that population back up to a healthy level gets cut
down significantly if we stop killing the ones that are
making the babies. And so what those guys are doing
killing twenty two thousand buwl redfish. That's illegal for everybody else.
And so that's point number one. The other thing is, though,
you got to look at some of the other species
that are being killed, you know, eighty one million crokers.
(22:46):
I mean, the estimate is that literally every time those
guys set a net, they're killing six thousand plus crokers.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
You know.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Not only is that an important forage pace, an important
part of the ecosystem, but crokers are also a fish
that recreational and commercial fishermen like to catch because they're
very good to eat, you know, and that could be
a viable commercial target off of Louisiana's coast for commercial
fishermen that don't have snapper quota or other things.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
They could be catching those crokers.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And there has been a just a stark lack of
bull crokers that folks talk about all the time now.
In the sixties and seventies, when they would go offshore
or they would fish lake, ponch train, et cetera, they'd
catch these two pound crokers.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
They don't really catch them anymore, like it's a huge deal.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
It's almost as big a deal to catch a two
and a half pound croker as it is a twenty
five pound.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
Red snapper two and a half pound. Croakers just aren't
there anymore.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
And maybe one of the reasons they're not there is
because the poke boats are killing eighty one million of
those crokers every single.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
Year, you know. So it was just those kind of
numbers that really jump off the page.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
To twenty five million white trout, five and a half
million white shrimp, you know, millions and millions of mullet
harrying and other things that are out there. You know,
that's all an important part of the ecosystem, and these
things are supposedly being killed by accident, you know. And
another number that not a lot of folks have talked
about are made a big deal of is a two
(24:12):
hundred and forty thousand speckl trout. Well, you know, speckel
trout is one of those fish that generally doesn't get
captured in nets unless it's a gild net. I mean,
they're they're pretty good at getting out of trolls. They're
you know, pretty good at escape and capture, you know,
in these persones. But again, two hundred and forty thousand
speckled trout, I would be willing to bet you that
that if you took ten charter boat captains from Grand Isle,
(24:36):
those ten charter boat captains combined in their careers may
not take customers to kill two hundred and forty thousand
combined speckl trout. If a charter boat captain was taking
four customers to catch a limit of speckl trout, and
again a limit of trout now.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Per person in Louisiana's fifteen per day, it's still a
lot of fish.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
You'd have to do that four thousand times to equal
to one hundred and forty thousand spec wul trial. There's
just not a lot of charter boat captains who are
going to do that. I mean, that's the kind of
numbers we're talking about, because that's the volume at which
this vicuery operates.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
We know the Menhaden industry has been around for over
a century, the late eighteen hundreds to be more specific.
So why has the conflict around this operation seemed to
have such a significant spike in these recent years.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I think what has stood out to people in the
last decade or so in terms of the change that
people have seen in terms of their interactions with the boats,
is that they went from being domestically owned companies to
foreign controlled companies that didn't really take the same perspective
(25:57):
when it came to how they approach the fishery that
they had when they were domestically owned fisheries.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
And that's not me making this up.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
I mean that's reflected in some of the data that
we see that in the last ten years a lot
more of the harvest has come closer to shore than
it used to. And then you know, hearing from fisheries
regulators in Louisiana who've told me off the record on
the side, you know, there was a time where if
we were getting a lot of conflicts and people were
complaining about dead fish or bycatch. You know, if they
(26:28):
complained to say the Department of Wildlife Fisheries, the department
would call the pokey companies and say, hey, y'all might
need to back off a little bit. But those things
stop happening. You know, if you're a lawmaker who's from
North Louisiana, or you're you know, a member of Congress
or whatever, you know, you look at commercial fisheries and
you say, well, you know, these guys are operating very
(26:48):
close to the margins and this is a small operation.
That's not the case. These are not mom and pop crabbers.
This is not a sole proprietor shrimp or anything like that.
I mean, this is a large industrial activity and they
harvest and kill things on an industrial scale, and so you.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
Got to look at it like that. It's not a
mom and pop shripping operation.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
It's a very large, internationally owned, industrial scale fishing operation.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
They got spot or planes that are telling these pogy
boats where to go. They got planes in the air
flying and they give them coordinaces. The boat goes straight
to that spot. They encompass that whole area with that
net and whatever's in that net. When they pulling that
net in, the pogies regurgitate and they put off the
(27:38):
slime off their skin. That's just it makes the water
like a slurry. It's real thick and it's nasty. So
all of these fish that are in that net with
the pogies are breathing that stuff in and it's clogging
up their gills and they can't get oxident and that's
why they're dying. So they they have the hose with
(28:02):
the big cage on the end that only allows smaller
fish in. So when they released all the rest of
the fish that are in there, they dead. This last
instance we had was about two or three weeks ago.
I got a call on a Monday. It said they
were right there on the beach, right here in front
(28:24):
of grand Isle. And I got another phone call from
a guy on Wednesday morning because I went. I went
out Wednesday morning in my boat. We went to fish
Tripletail out towards the mouth of the river, and on
the way back, I got a call from a guide
that said grand Ale Beach has hundreds of bullreds dead
(28:46):
on the beach. So we were coming back from the
mouth of the river and I saw at least fourteen
poge boats in for a baya, which is just easter
here over. They were all together in this one area,
so we went straight over there. So I got some
(29:08):
pictures of some dead redfish floating. And then the Wednesday
is when all of redfish were on the beach. I
got pictures all that Wednesday afternoon Thursday, I got in
my boat and I went to the islands east of
grand Isle, which is only accessible by a boat, and
I have forty pictures over there of dead bullreds. So
(29:33):
all of those bull reds they captured in the nets
on Monday were all dead and floated against the beach,
and that's the only ones I could find. There was
probably more than that. Redfish don't have babies until they
over twenty seven inches the ones that they're killing. There
wasn't one dead red fish out of the one hundred
(29:54):
forty pictures I got that was under twenty seven inches.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
So they're killing all breeding SIZEA.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
Yes, killing all the ones having the babies, but yet
they've stopped the recreational guy from keeping our catching them
at all.
Speaker 8 (30:22):
Thank you for calling day Brook Fishery.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
If you know your party's extension, you may vale with
at any time.
Speaker 8 (30:27):
Tell me the voicemail that's one after good Chown. Hey,
my name is Lake. I produce a podcast called Backwoods
University for the media or podcast network. I'm calling to
inquire and see if someone from your organization would be
open to doing a quick interview. I have a flexible
schedule and I could do these interviews digitally, so please
(30:48):
let me know if anyone from your organization be willing
to talk with me, and I would love to talk
with you. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I'm going to put this out there again if anyone
from the men hay and fishing industry is willing to
share their side of this story by all means get
back with me. However, I think we can all agree
that everything we have heard so far is some moving information.
What I'm curious about now is what do we do
with it? Where do we go from here.
Speaker 7 (31:18):
I'll preface this by saying I don't want anybody to
lose their jobs. You know, there's a lot of things
we've done in wildlife and fisheries over the years that
we used to do that we can't do anymore because
they realize they ain't good for the environment. It ain't
good for the fisheries, ain't good for the wildlight, what
have you. So, I think that's kind of where we're
(31:41):
going with this. I mean, they've outlawed it pretty much
everywhere else in the country except for small way. It's
not nowhere near the large scale, industrial scale they have
here in Louisiana. They have a I think it's a
half mile buffer zone off of Placamus Parish, which look
half mile is not that far. No, let me tell
(32:03):
you if it was three miles, we would never have conflicts.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
See, that's what's interesting is so, I mean I was interviewed.
I interviewed a guy in grandal to day and uh,
you know, I was just trying to get honest answers.
And I said, man, if you could have a magic
wand and you can, you can make the laws, you
can wave magic wand what would you do. I thought
he was going to say, I'd make the whole thing
go away. Yeah, And he said, I just wish they'd
(32:27):
stay at their three miles buffers on.
Speaker 6 (32:30):
Three miles in front of grand Isle is great. I
don't know why it's not three miles all along the coasts.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
So you think they're there, there could potentially be a
way for them to find a way for everybody can work.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Like, you don't.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Necessarily have to shut the poge boats down, they just
need to move out further.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Is that what you're saying.
Speaker 6 (32:50):
Yeah, I don't have a problem when the pogie boats
work and just not killing everything inside, right, and they
and they're probably still going to have have some by
catch being that for out, but at least it's not
on the beach where they're killing all the spectacled trout,
the croakers, all the smaller fish that can't go out
(33:12):
in that deep water because they're gonna get eaten. They
on that beach because that's their protection and that's where
they thrive at. So yeah, if the pogi boats were
further out, and I know what they're gonna say, the
polgive industry is gonna say, they can't catch nothing out
that far. I don't know what else to tell you.
(33:35):
We're the only state that allows this practice to continue.
Speaker 7 (33:40):
If you push them out further, you would never have
that conflict because I'm gonna tell you, we don't never
drift out three miles, right, never, never, never, never. Now
how it impacts their fishery, I mean, I can't say that.
Speaker 4 (33:54):
I don't know.
Speaker 7 (33:55):
I don't know, but I do know if they were
outside of three miles, they are off a grand isle,
this would be a moot point. Now they ain't gonna
be good enough for some people, But you know what,
I'm willing to give something, yeah, or they willing to
give something.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Compromise, Yeah, compromise.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I just man, I feel like and this is I
haven't been able to talk to anybody on the men
Haden fishery side. I honestly just for the just for
the sake of having a balanced journalism, I would try
to talk to one of them, but I haven't been
able to do that. But everything that I'm pointing to
that that I can gather it points to this needs
to be looked at just from a ecological standpoint and
(34:35):
for the health of the fishery. It's like it seems
to be folks need to take a closer look at this.
And two, understand the men and haden industry. I understand
there's jobs there. Understand that. Yeah, also understand how much
tourism dollars and big the businesses for charter guide service.
Speaker 7 (34:54):
Well okay, and not to cut you off, but that
is therein lies a big problem because look, you know,
the commercial fishing has always butted heads with recreational that
is wherever you go, you know, and look, there's there's
sometimes as a disconnect. You know, people don't don't realize that,
you know that what's what's going on out there is
(35:16):
that they don't see it. Most of my people from
out of town, so not only did they pay my
rate that I charge, but they're staying at a bed
and breakfast and right the import selfer, you know, they're
traveling through. We stopped at the local grocery store because
they needed to get something. We came back from fishing.
They went, they lunch yesterday when they got in earliest
(35:37):
that when they lunch at the small restaurant, right the
import selfer. So it's not only my fee, my rate
I'm charging per day, but it's the lodges, it's the stores,
and we're bringing all these people in. What how much
are the men Hagen boats? How many people are coming
in on the men Who's day? None of those guys
(35:58):
are coming in and stay ain't at lodges and all that. Yeah,
you know, the boats are buying food maybe from a
local vendor. But as far as people actually come in
and going down those guys going to Venice Marina or
going to Cypruss Cove or going to the you know
this lodge or that lord, they ain't doing that. And
(36:18):
our guys are that. You know, we're a small parish.
We don't have the oil industry like we used to have,
commercial fishing, edting like it used to be. So you know,
they pay property taxes and I mean so you know
they've been around, They've been around a long time, so
people want to protect it.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
And I get that. I get that, Like I said, I.
Speaker 7 (36:37):
Don't want anybody to lose their job, But I say,
what about me? I mean, what about what I do?
What about people coming from all over the country. I'd
say ninety percent of my people are coming from the
way out. It's an economic impact that I'm going to
tell you. If you didn't have that for a lot
of these small coastal communities, they wouldn't be It'd be
a ghost.
Speaker 8 (36:57):
Have that.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Yeah, I think it's a lot about the character of
these men that the solution that they're seeking here is
really just an even playing field for both sides. I
mean really, after the stories that they share, and honestly,
some of them didn't even make it endo the episode
due to time constraints, I thought for sure that they
would be wanting to put an end to menhaden fishing outright,
(37:20):
But they didn't. They recognized that this industry is how
some folks make their living and support their families. They
realize that this industry has an economic impact. I'm going
to share my own opinion here, but based off of
the information that I have right now, I think that
what these guys are asking for is reasonable. They want
to take a closer look at the fishing industry, the methods,
(37:42):
the bycatch, the conflict between recreational and charter fishermen. Is
there a way that they can find more common ground.
Is there ways to continue harvesting men haden and it
be more sustainable with less bycatch and less harm done
to the habitat. These questions are not outlandish, and I
think worth being asked, and more importantly, I think they're
(38:03):
worth finding an answer to.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
We really weren't ever pushing or haven't ever been pushing
to eliminate the men hate in the industry. But what
we wanted to do was find a way that they
can continue to operate, but to protect some of those
more sensitive habitats that we knew were being damaged by
those nets and by those boats making contact with the
water bottom and getting, you know, very very close to
(38:28):
our beaches. I mean, I've seen pokey boats setting nets
in water that was four and a half to five
feet deep. You know, these boats draft ten feet at
least nine feet maybe at a minimum when they're empty,
which means I have watched them plow through the water bottom.
You know, I've watched them dig up the sand and
(38:51):
dig up the sandbars to get the boat into where
they were harvesting the fish. And I know that that
persane is making an enormous amount of contact on that
water bottom. I see the amount of sediment that's being
stirred up. And the fact is there's not a biologist
who would argue against this, but that you know, the
majority of your biomass, you know, in a coastal situation,
(39:14):
happens in that area that's within a mile or two
of the beach. That's just where most of your species
are going to be. You know, there was a conservation
element to moving the boats into a little bit deeper water,
and it was that by not having those nets all
over the bottom of the water, you were going to
reduce potentially the volume of bycatch, but also reduce the
(39:38):
number of species that were being impacted, and you were
going to keep that water bottom more intact. And this
is something I think we've seen born out in that
by catch study. You know, as you move into deeper water,
the number of species impacted go down, the volume of
bycatch goes down, and so there is a conservation value
to moving those boats into deeper water. You know, it'd
(40:00):
be nice for them to make some concessions here and there,
that a little bit of conservation goes a long way,
not just from a public relations perspective, but just from
the value of our resource. You know, Let's say you
went to the Prairie Pothole region, right and you told
the duck hunters up there that there was this industry
that was going to employ a few hundred people. It
was going to have some economic impact on the communities,
(40:23):
it was going.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
To provide some jobs.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
The trade off there is going to be we're going
to have to kill thirty thousand specklebelly geese, about two
hundred and fifty thousand blueing teal and mallards, and about
one hundred thousand mourning doves or a hundred million mourning doves.
You guys cool with that? Nobody would be cool with that.
Nobody would be cool with that, and no politician would
(40:49):
back that, you know, nobody would put their name to that.
And yet that's in essence what's happening here. I mean,
that's sort of the level that we're dealing with. I mean,
red fish in Louisiana or a game fish.
Speaker 4 (41:02):
And the bottom.
Speaker 3 (41:03):
Line is it's not okay for those guys to be
killing those fish. It's not because it's not okay for
anybody else to be killing them.
Speaker 7 (41:12):
I wish I had more education on the actual industry itself,
as far as you know why going out deeper would
affect their profit margin or.
Speaker 4 (41:23):
What would it? What would it? What would it?
Speaker 7 (41:24):
What would them being out three miles statewide due to
their bottom line or their business? And I'm sure when
people on the other side are listening to this, they're
gonna be saying, yeah, you don't know, you don't know. No,
I don't, but tell me and let me know. But still,
can we meet? Can you know, let's let's find a
let's find a meeting place. I would say, hey, if
(41:45):
you see boats over there, just don't go buy them.
What I'm doing is sustainable, yeah, because I ain't keeping nothing.
I'm throwing them all back. Does a fish die and
every now and then maybe, but I mean we we
fight them, we unhook them, you know, every now and
then you might have one that's hooked.
Speaker 4 (42:01):
Deep it bleeds a little bit, but that is like
very rare, rare, you know.
Speaker 7 (42:05):
So I can say without a shadow doubt that what
I'm doing is sustainable and it can and if you
protect the fishery, what I'm doing. You can do this forever.
You know, if you keep on keeping on the way,
we're losing habitat. Eventually all that large scale industrial fishing
that's gonna be done.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
I'll tell you one thing. For my separate conversations with Keith,
Shane and Chris, all of them have an undeniable appreciation
for the Louisiana coast. It comes from a place of
authenticity and I respect it.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
It's impossible not to.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Before we wrap this up, I want to hear some
final thoughts from both Chris and Keith about what they
think and hope for the future of the Menhaden fishing industry.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
You know, my primary focus at TRCP has always been habitat,
habitat restoration and the Mississippi River basin, especially focused in Louisiana,
and it's a top two to three priority for our
center in particular, and it's a priority for our board
and for the organization, and it will continue to be
because I think there is a path. It's difficult to
(43:13):
see it right now, but there is a path to
not only better conservation in the Atlantic Basin when it
comes to men Ain't fishing, but also in the Gulf.
Speaker 6 (43:22):
I'm opening as many eyes as I can to this
right now. I'm hoping that something gets done. I mean,
that's all I can do is try. If I don't
succeed doing this, I'm just gonna throw my hands up
and say we can't do nothing about it. You know,
that's all you can do.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, well, I hope something does change.
Speaker 6 (43:45):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
For every probably I'll say.
Speaker 6 (43:48):
It's not me. It's not about me. It's about the
kids coming up, you know, families coming down here to
enjoy ourselves and catch fish. In the future, I'll be
long gone. People will still be fishing. Yeah, and if
(44:08):
you keep wiping them out, then I will be here.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Regardless of where you fall on this issue, Hopefully we
can all agree on wanting a healthy and sustainable fishery
and coastal habitat in the future. The question is how
do we get there? What do y'all think. If there's
one thing I am confident in, it's that we should
never be afraid to ask questions. I want to thank
(44:39):
all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well
as Bear Grease and this country life. I mean, really,
the warm welcome that all of you have given me
to this bear grease podcast. Feed means a whole lot
and I appreciate it. And hey, if you liked this episode,
share it with either the worst or best angler you
have in your contact list. Only don't tell them what
(44:59):
you that's one they are.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
Leave them guessing.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
And also be sure to check out Blood Trails, the
newest podcast addition to the Meat Eater Network. This is
the true crime genre and hunting and fishing world Colliding,
hosted by writer and journalist Jordan Sillers. You will hear
everything from missing hunters, poachers turned killers, and fishing trips
gone fatally wrong. It is a fascinating podcast that you
(45:23):
will not want to miss in the first episode premiere's Thursday,
October thirtieth. Be sure to check that out and subscribe
to it so that you'll be notified when the first
episode drops. I'm telling you this is gonna be good.
And stick around here because if this podcast was an
inshore fishing trip, we haven't even made it out of
the no wake zone yet. We're just getting started. There's
(45:44):
a whole lot more on the way.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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