BALDWIN, Ala. — Inland, in Montgomery, Alabama’s commercial gill net fishermen are facing yet another legislative attempt to ban commercial gill nets. On a Baldwin County beach, however, two recent boating accidents have underscored the physical dangers commercial gill net fishermen say they are facing as their livelihood is increasingly hedged in by mounting restrictions.

The boating incidents occurred the nights of April 6 and April 7 as two Spanish mackerel gill netters fished in rough waters in the Gulf near Perdido Pass in Orange Beach.

Darla Baird of Magnolia Springs calls the waters that Monday night, April 7, “real rough.”

Baird, who said this week that she married into the commercial gill net fishing business, was fishing east of Perdido Pass near the first condo. She was 100 to 150 feet off the beach, she said.

The wheel of her 25-foot boat got caught in a bait trap used by a charter boat, resulting in her motor locking. She was eventually forced to cut her net, a 1,300-foot net she said cost approximately $2,500. The waves were coming over the side of the boat and those waves eventually pushed her boat onto the beach.

Darla said she feared for the life of her elderly father, who was fishing with her that night.

Maburn Rhodes, president emeritus of the Alabama Seafood Association, said Baird shouldn’t have been fishing in such weather in the first place.

“Now, they (commercial gill netters) have to work in bad weather when they didn’t before,” he said.

Why? Because last year the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources took weekend fishing in the Gulf of Mexico away from commercial gill net fishermen, said Rhodes, a net-maker who lives in Bon Secour.

“They’re lucky if they get three days a week in the Gulf,” he said, a reference to the Gulf’s unpredictable conditions.

According to Rhodes, commercial gill netters can fish weekdays in the Gulf from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m. Where weekends are concerned, however, they must be out of the Gulf by noon on Friday and can’t return until Sunday night.

“Now they go out there in weather conditions they wouldn’t ordinarily go in,” said Rhodes, noting fishermen don’t have weekends to fall back on now if weekday fishing conditions are poor.

Another case in point is Johnny Williamson, also a Spanish mackerel gill net fisherman. A breaker turned his boat over the night of April 6 just west of where Baird was fishing the following night.

“Johnny Williamson’s partner was under the boat for several minutes before he could get out,” said Rhodes, who likens what Alabama’s 100-plus licensed commercial gill net fishermen are going through today to Christians being fed to the lions 2,000 years ago for the pleasure of the masses.

Only, Rhodes makes a distinction: “We’re being fed to lions for the pleasure of a few.”

He doesn’t believe the “masses” care about commercial gill net fishing taking place a hundred feet or so off of Alabama’s seasonal tourist-choked beaches.

“I don’t believe the average tourist could care less one way or the other about us fishing,” he said, noting tourists attempted to help the fishermen whose boats were damaged earlier this month.

OPTIMISM IN 2007

In early spring of last year, commercial gill netters were looking at the possible end to a way of life with roots going back to the founding of fishing villages like Bon Secour.

A bill presented in March would have banned commercial gill nets based on allegations of declines in fish populations along the Alabama coast. Commercial gill net permits last year were down from 600 a scant dozen years before to 120. As part of the 2007 legislation, the state would have bought out the existing 120 permits and offered economic relief to those holding the permits. Also, free tuition at any public school operated by the Department of Postsecondary Education was offered to those willing to surrender their commercial gill net permits.

“One of the most generous” offered by any state is the way one of the sponsors of last year’s bill described the state’s buyout of commercial gill netters who surrendered their permits by Oct. 1, 2007.

By May, however, a compromise bill was passed in the Alabama House of Representatives that, among other things, called for a five-year study by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. That study was to entail the quantity of saltwater finfish in Alabama salt and brackish waters and the amount of finfish harvested by commercial and recreational fishermen.

If that final report determined commercial gill nets were depleting state waters and the depletion could not be remedied by other measures, the Advisory Board of Conservation and Natural Resources would prohibit the use of commercial gill nets.

Commercial gill net fishermen didn’t fear the science, Rhodes said after the compromise bill was passed in the House. That bill was passed by the Senate, but when the Commissioner of Conservation and Natural Resources changed the way the buyouts were to be funded, the House had adjourned before the bill could be sent back to them. The bill died.

Mobile attorney Edwin Lamberth, chairman of Coastal Conservation Association of Alabama’s Governmental Relations Committee, said CCA would not have been happy with last year’s bill had it run its legislative course.

As it turned out, CCA Alabama has introduced yet another round of legislation this year to ban commercial gill nets. Sept. 30, 2008, would be the deadline for banning the gill nets. If this year’s attempt fails, Lamberth said CCA will continue to introduce legislation to rid Alabama waters of gill nets.

“Not many people can make a living working three days a week,” said Rhodes of the restrictions currently facing commercial gill netters.

His net-making business was down 40 percent last year. According to Baird, a combination of health issues and restrictions placed upon her as a commercial gill netter had her income down $60,000 last year.

Baird isn’t fishing at all since the night of April 7. She’s looking at yet another week without fishing, that is, if her boat motor isn’t damaged. If so, it’ll be even more time before she returns to the water.

“So far, we’re a few thousand dollars down,” she said of repairs and recovery costs resulting from the night of April 7.

Baird, who has been fishing commercially for 14 years, said she is planning a fish fry this weekend for Rast Construction Co., which was working nearby at the time of the boating accident. Rast used some of their equipment to pull the boat up on the sand, she said.

She believes it was a lifeguard who initially made them remove machinery and equipment off the beach, resulting in a two-hour loss of time in recovering her boat. Six hours after her boat was pushed to the beach, it was filled with sand and water, Baird said.

It was Alabama Marine Police who finally told her to do whatever it took to remove her boat, Baird said.

According to Rhodes, Williamson is now using a loaner boat to fish. It took him nearly a week to get his mackerel boat since Orange Beach wouldn’t allow him to bring a truck down to the beach to get his boat. “No traffic on the beach,” is the way Rhodes put it as regards Orange Beach.

“It sank two or three times,” Rhodes said of Williamson’s boat.

Williamson went back with his mullet boat to try to get the mackerel boat and sank the second boat as well.

After Sea Tow, a marine recovery company from Florida, eventually lost Williamson’s boat in what Rhodes describes as 25 to 30 feet of water, the boat eventually washed up on shore and Orange Beach allowed Williamson to get the boat.

INCOMPATIBLE USES

Phillip West, Coastal Resources manager for Orange Beach, said unauthorized vehicles are prohibited from being on the city’s beaches. He is quick to point out, however, that the city didn’t prohibit Baird and Williamson from getting their fishing equipment. Indeed, city labor and city equipment were used to move some of that equipment, he said.

“It has cost the city in labor and equipment time,” he said this week, “(but) we’re not sending anyone a bill.”

Unlike Rhodes’ and Baird’s sentiments, West said the city wasn’t an obstruction to the two gill netters. That would have been “adding insult to injury,” he said.

Besides, “We want it off the beach,” West said of any capsized boat.

West said he writes the permits for beach access and he didn’t deny anyone in connection with the boating incidents.

Yet, “off the beach” is something the city wants where commercial gill net fishing is concerned, that is, off the beach in the sense of a larger buffer between the fishermen and the tourists on the beach.

West said the city isn’t pursuing a local ordinance in that regard — probably doesn’t have the authority to do so — but is asking the state to put a larger buffer in place between what he calls “two incompatible uses.”

Most “resource extraction uses” typically have some kind of buffer in place, he said.

“It’s kind of like zoning for the water.”

Indeed, last year Orange Beach took official action in support of legislation that would have banned commercial gill nets.

Commercial gill netters come in almost to the shoreline if conditions in the Gulf allow, West said. While he hasn’t as yet set down with aerial maps and measured the distance to the outside sandbars along the beach, West said he would unofficially advocate keeping the gill netters “outside the second sandbar,” roughly 300 to 600 feet off the beach, a distance Rhodes said would keep the fishermen from catching enough fish to make a living.

Asked if commercial gill net fishing as a way of life would be missed in Baldwin County if prohibited by law, West said absolutely not for those who fish recreationally. Others probably wouldn’t venture a guess on the subject, he said, but those informed as to what takes place in gill net fishing would find it’s “not a charming local industry.”

Without commercial gill net fishing, recreational fishing would improve dramatically and that would reverberate all over the state, West said.

“I’m very suspect when somebody says if you take away this tool we can’t survive,” West said, noting people have to adapt to changing technology.

He calls Alabama the “last on the block” to make the transition away from commercial gill nets.

‘TIDE COMES IN, TIDE GOES OUT’

Pete Barber of Theodore, president of the Alabama Seafood Association, said ASA and the commercial gill netters are “outgunned” as far as money and what he calls “access,” meaning the recreational fishermen’s ability to contact state legislators via e-mails with a single keystroke.

Barber was in Montgomery this week for the legislative session and, while he said ASA and the gill netters have some solid support in the Legislature, he prefaced that in a telephone interview Thursday with a fishing maxim: “The tide comes in, the tide goes out.

“I have to stay worried about it,” he said of the proposed legislation that would ban commercial gill nets.

Barber would like to see the gill net issue start in 2008 where it ended in the 2007 legislative session, namely, with the compromise bill that passed the House and Senate. Instead, he said, things are starting at what he called “ground zero.”

Barber calls the Coastal Conservation Association “exclusionary” and said they have been guilty of “strongarm tactics” in the past.

“Our recreational fishing is getting better; at the same time, we have a fairly healthy net fishery,” he said.

Texas and Florida banned commercial gill nets, Barber said, and the “recreational fishing wasn’t the giant bonanza promised.”

While Barber said ASA isn’t against CCA, he said the latter is attempting to prove something they can’t deliver on, namely, that a ban on commercial gill nets will enhance recreational fishing.

Lamberth of CCA Alabama called Barber’s assertion “absolutely false.” He said peer review studies by “world renown experts” have proven that getting rid of the “destructive fishing gear” that is a gill net has significantly benefitted recreational fishing.

THE SCIENCE

Dr. Bob Shipp of the marine science department at the University of South Alabama in Mobile said, indeed, the science is strong that gill nets deplete fish stocks.

“Texas has 30 years of peer reviewed data on the impact of removing gill nets there,” he said in a e-mail sent in connection with this article.

“In every case stocks improved and diversity improved.”

Vernon Minton, director of the Marine Resources Division of the State Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, agrees with a point Shipp makes in the same e-mail, namely, that Alabama has a problem with “localized depletion” of fish stocks.

Shipp said Spanish mackerel stocks are healthy Gulf-wide, but locally gill netters have targeted the fish and their numbers and catches have “fallen dramatically, especially by recreational/tourist accounts, as well as commercial landings.”

Of commercial landings, Minton said that isn’t true: “It’s been rising,” he said.

According to Minton, the amount of fish harvested locally only falls as a result of weather-related circumstances and regulatory restrictions, such as keeping the commercial gill netters out of the Gulf from noon on Fridays until 7 p.m. on Sundays.

“Something is going on but we don’t know what,” said Minton of the “localized depletion.” No data currently exists, he said in the same telephone interview, to support the local depletion viewpoint or refute it.

UP TO LEGISLATORS

“Are we (CCA) trying to wipe out commercial fishing? No,” Lamberth said, noting that the legislation CCA supports is targeted solely at gill nets.

“If what you’re doing is overly destructive to marine resources, we’re against it,” he said, noting that applies equally to commercial gill netters and anyone affiliated with CCA.

Rhodes said National Marine Fisheries allows nine million pounds of Spanish mackerel to be harvested annually along the entire Gulf Coast, that in an effort to keep the stock healthy. He doesn’t believe two million pounds has ever been harvested in a year’s time.

Lamberth, on the other hand, said the reason for that is almost all the commercially-harvested Spanish occurs here, along the Alabama coast. He cited data from 2006 by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources showing that Alabama gill netters reported “just under” one million pounds of Spanish caught that year.

(CCA says Baldwin County has approximately 50 licensed gill net fishermen, 20 of which fish for Spanish mackerel.)

As for Barber’s allegations of strongarm tactics by CCA, Lamberth said that carries the connotation of threat, unethical behavior or immoral actions, none of which is associated with CCA, he said.

CCA Alabama says the state’s recreational fishing industry is a half billion dollar enterprise that is going to get smaller if commercial gill nets continue to be allowed.

“People in Baldwin County and Mobile County go to other states (to fish recreationally) because the nets are gone,” Lamberth said.

Likewise, people living outside the Gulf states are choosing to come south and fish in states that have banned commercial gill nets rather than come to Alabama to fish, he said.

Whatever the outcome of gill net legislation in 2008, both sides of the issue seem to realize the matter is ultimately out of their hands.

Lamberth said it depends on whether the Alabama Senate actually does any work this time around. Barber said the Senate was in “knots” this week over a gambling measure for Macon County.