2016-06-20 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — June 20, 2016 well, even say 60 years ago it was hard to get around on the Big Island very far. You couldn't just, take a car on a high speed highway and get to the other side of the island. You would — even when you had cars — so now any particular fishing spot is available to anybody pretty much anywhere on the island. We have changes in technology — we have tsuji [sp?] nets — high powered spear guns — depth finders — all kinds of technology, all in pursuit of a resource that has a maximum sustainable yield and, perhaps in some cases we've overshot that in some places, so this is an experiment that's being — that's gonna be tried, I think the people fear and I understand this — people have a fear, well, what happens next? Are all these — is everything going to be shut down, and I understand that and I, my expectation — I wouldn't say that I would expect this to be last thing like this but I would also say that I wouldn't expect there to be closures of very — like even a majority of the coast for even temporary periods of time. Right now we have four small Marine Life Conservation Districts in Kona that are closed to basically most types of fishing. We have this 3'/2 mile stretch of coastline in Kaupulehu and there are restrictions in net fishing over fairly — net and aquarium fishing over fairly large areas — and, of course, there are things like off-seasons for moi or lobster and the like — but for the most part the bulk of the coastline is available for most types of fishing and I would expect that, that would continue onward into the future, so with that I've probably gone over what I said I was gonna do — five or ten minutes, but I'd be happy to take questions that people might have. NP: Most everyone I've heard is opposed. What happened to these people in favor that you were talking about — why listen to them and not these people opposed, which seems so much more. CY: Well, at the public hearing in — at Kealakehe High in February there were probably about 200 people there and a strong majority of the people who spoke were in favor of the change. And most of the people who came to the BLNR meeting in Honolulu a month ago were in favor of it. Most of the written testimony was in favor of it, so, I don't know why, people attend some meetings and other people attend other meetings but that's — there was quite a strong support for this. NP: Well, to be fair — couldn't it be five years? I mean ten -years to a lot of people means the rest of their life. CY: There was some testimony in favor of five years, there was also some [unclear] testimony that a longer closure would be highly beneficial — that, you know, one thing that I learned that really surprised me is how long reef fish live. If you asked me when I was a diver, how long a kala lived, I would have said, a year maybe, a couple of years. But they can live thirty years. So, there's not a hard and fast, time for this, but the feeling was that 10