[47onthewall]

Jim, the lobstermen have been saddled with increasingly burdensome regs for the last ten years for little benefit other than making the greenies feel like they are accomplishing something. What purpose does it serve to make gear "whale safe" in the Piscataqua River and Great Bay? They have mandated a ban on floating groundlines so now fishermen on hard bottom have to spend dollars they don't have for sinking rope that snag bottom and reults in "ghost gear" littering the bottom. Their policy makers now have a stated goal of removing all vertical lines, connecting bouys to traps, within ten years. You cannot conduct a trap fishery on a commercial scale for lobsters with some sort of James Bond style electronically deployed bouy when a fisherman arrives at his trap. Educate yourself by picking up a copy of Commercial Fisheries News to see how far the other way the scale is tipped. Oh yeah, and the Navy can kill as many whales as neccessary to keep their sailors sharp in training exercises (high-powered sonar is bad for marine mammals). When a species is at such low population levels that it can't find enough mates to successfully increase its numbers it is on its way out. I would have liked to see a wooly mammoth somewhere besides the Discovery Channel but its time came and went,and I don't feel guilty our ancestors ate them.