EP213: Redfish Reality

So I got scotty from charleston ty bailey from louisiana and we brought blaine back to talk about the the northern stock of redfish in virginia um thank all y'all for listening and we're gonna hop right into it so blaine was on the podcast last night the rest of y'all weren't but um one of the big focuses was how difficult some of the menhaden advocates are making it for us to conserve predatory species in the atlantic it's striped bass and redfish and in louisiana it's redfish i mean how many times and you know just whoever wants to answer answer How many times have y'all heard collectively, well, it doesn't matter what regulations we put on redfish, they're never going to come back unless we stop the menhaden fishery.

Do you believe that statement?

No.

Dwayne jumps right in.

I think that's the biggest disservice to what goes on in Louisiana conservation and fisheries policy is just the straw manning of the Midden-Hayden deal and how we can excuse all the bad behavior that we've been doing.

doing for my entire lifetime, Ty's entire lifetime, our father's entire lifetimes, and just on and on.

I mean, it's an excuse, and we've just watched the fishery continue to fall down a slippery slope while we blame something that we can't really get a lot of legislation done on.

Yeah, I mean, it's mostly just... you look at it it's it's always people pointing the finger at everything else you know it's always it's it's rarely it's oh yeah it's us but also that it's always you know well what about these guys what about what these guys are doing what about what these guys are killing and then and it's just one of those things where 400 000 fishing licenses You know, I always say long before we ever even got this whole thing started with changing limits and all years ago, I said if all 4,000 fishing licenses just, you know, threw back one redfish a year, it makes a big difference.

And there's a lot of factors against it from land loss to, you know, pretty much everything, but...

One thing we could do, as Tony has always said, this is the knob we have to turn.

It's a pretty big knob, if you ask me.

Stop killing so many damn fish.

So, Scotty, you're in a little bit of a different situation because your state actually did the right thing.

So what do you hear? I don't know if you hear that menhaden are the main cause for the decline in redfish in Charleston, or do you?

There's little back chatter about it.

We obviously don't ever see the commercial manhattan boats like some of you guys do.

But I've definitely heard people saying that they have seen less manhattan this year and last year.

They've seen less and less.

They can't find them, things like that.

But, I mean, there's still plenty.

They eventually find them.

And I agree.

I don't think that's the problem, especially with redfish, because they'll eat anything.

I mean, we found them with those diamondback terrapins hanging out of their mouth, you know, trying to eat turtles.

And they'll find another food source.