Didn't the CORA managed tribal commercial fishery kinda, sorta, conisistently violate the Consent Decree of 2020 agreement by exceeding their catch quotas for lake trout in four statistical discricts for multiple years in sequence, ignoring the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) values set by the Sustainable Fishery Model that boat signatories originally agreed to use as a guiding document to set those annual quotas? Now, let's take a look at lake trout recovery in the three broad assessmment untis of Lake Michigan: the southern basin has roughly 42% of its lake trout stocks of wild origin; the middle basin is running at 28-32% wild origin fish; while the northern basin is running at 13% whild origin lake trout. Yes, the Consent Decree of 2020 specifies a set amount of lake trout plants be make in Treaty waters in Michigan.
'Need fish to catch'. That, on its face, is an interesting comment that ties well with the three judge appeals court panel that heard the LDBN subsistance fisher''s appeal for their four year effort to sell walleye and yellow perch to the Jensens for them to resell them as "by-catch" from their tribal commercial nets. Subsistance fishers are allowed 75lbs. round weight per week that cannot be bartered, sold, or traded. That is about thirty pounds of fillets...per week. They are allowed to fish 350' nets, not gang-rig them to a thousand feet to fish under-ice. When the judges asked Tom Gorenflo, CORA head biologist, whether CORA biolgists had ever turned-over any catch reports that evidenced discrpencies since the inception of the CORA managed fishery in 2000, His eventual answer was NO. Kinda, sorta begs the question of who is complicit ....
One of my recent "favorite" quotes was the Odawa tribal biologist who presented at the Great Lakes Fishery Commission Lake Committee meetings recently. He complained about the impacts of too many lake trout in tribal gillnets and trap nets in Treaty Waters because it has resulted in a net decrease in commercial netters because they have to handle of these fish...to catch the dwindling stocks of whitefish... Say, aren't these lake trout the ones the Consent Decree requires the State of Michigan to plant annually?
Yup, they just 'need fish to catch'. Sadly, both of us well know that that desire comes at the expense of the fishery and its constituent species. So, tell me again how they have a right to fish in any way they deem personally acceptable?
I also recall the one year follow-up from the 2015 USFWS fake fish wholesale sting operation run in L'Anse/Baraga. In that follow-up, agents identified an additional 6,430 violations by Treaty of 1842 and Treaty of 1836 tribal fishers that totaled just under 700,000 lbs of illegally caught and sold Great Lakes fish; fish caught from closed zones, illegally caught species including lake sturgeon, etc. Gordon, that is 350 tons of fish that somebody 'just needed to catch'. What was the response of the tribal governments who fish under the Treaty of 1836? They sent a battery of lawyers to Washington to point-out to the Dept. of Interior officials, the parent agency of both Indian Affairs and the USFWS, how much of a "black eye" further convictions would give the agency....
Gordon, I have fished salmon off Fairport in the midst of a tribal fishery since 2002. I have seen some ridiculous stuff occuring over that interval...
