Fishermen: Florida boats take too much

CHARLESTON (AP) – Some South Carolina fishermen want a group that manages offshore fishing to look into whether spear fishermen from Florida are exploiting the rules when they take thousands of pounds of game fish from the state’s artificial reefs.

Two or three boats per year come northward and spend a couple of weeks diving at the state’s 52 reefs, looking for flounder, scamp and big grouper, the South Carolina fishermen say.

The reefs are supposed to be for weekend fishermen who don’t have the time or experience to fish at natural live bottoms, said Sgt. Steve Pop with the Department of Natural Resources.

“It’s not a violation of federal law. But it is an issue. It’s disturbing to me,” Pop told The Post and Courier of Charleston.

Wildlife officials plan to talk to the South Atlantic Marine Fisheries Council about the practice.

The group makes the rules for fishing in the Atlantic off Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

The commercial boats can wipe out a reef in a day or two before moving on to the next one, said charter boat captain Eric Heiden of Georgetown, who said he hardly catches any flounder at reefs where he normally could catch two or three a trip.

But an Atlantic Beach, Fla., man with two boats operating off South Carolina said concerns from recreational boaters are overblown.

“We don’t rape the reefs or anything like that. We do take a lot of fish, don’t get me wrong. (But) there are still a lot of fish out there. We’re out there commercial fishing to feed the nation,” said Vic Lloyd, who has moved his boats north to South Carolina during the summer for about two decades.

And reef fishing can be better for the ocean than other forms of commercial fishing because divers target older, bigger, fish, leaving the younger ones to spawn and only go after the fish they want, said Rob Harding, of Mount Pleasant, a recreational diver and spear fisherman.

“The ‘reef raiders’ definitely do their share of shooting fish,” Harding said. “But in some ways it’s more ecologically sound.”