From the Publisher: I got this article from the IT and Financial Director of one of the nation's leading fishing suppliers. Lee Fisher International, based in Tampa, Florida, is a success story that could have only taken place in the US of A. During the 2010 season, we're going to be featuring the founder of the company; an unusual, compassionate, and pure business professional by the name of San Fu Lee. His company is the number-one supplier of commercial fishing netting to the world's market, and his store -- Tampa Fishing Outfitters -- is one of the best we've ever entered. It's where our partner Captain David Rieumont can be found most days.

But for now, this article that Fisher's IT genius Tony (also a great videographer, and close personal friend of ours) turned us onto is something you will definitely find interesting. I didn't edit it. The original -- in Mandarin Chinese -- was outside my editing capabilities. That said, despite the somewhat rounded way the translation comes across, what the author (nameless, as often happens in the Chinese newspapers (This came from a Beijing paper, and is tightly monitored prior to publication; clearly the government there allows men and women to talk freely about certain things. Could it be that even in the heart of a previously-untried version of Statism and Free-Market governing, that even the elite might like to grab a spinning rod -- or cane pole -- once in a while and feel the good strong pull of a fish?

Do the Chinese -- socialists to the core -- believe that the right to fish is something granted to mankind by a higher power? In this interesting article from a Mandarin newspaper -- and as censored as anything in Hugo Chavez' Venezuela -- seems to indicate that they do. If it's a man's right to fish without government interference in the most hammered-down nation on the planet earth, why is it that Jane Lubchenko and the environmentalist lunatics she's so in-bed with has more power than the freaken Chinese Government? The not-so-well translated Mandarin starts with a paragraph that actually mentions their "Fishing Rights-Related Legislation". Imagine that! I've been told that there's no such thing as "Fishing Rights" by people from the Environmental Defense Fund. The same wonderful people that -- in the same meeting -- told me that using the "rhetoric" of the US Constitution is why "they" (meaning those smarter then me) can see the need to control me and my ilk. Control this, Jane. Try and stop me from fishing for grouper or any other damned fish I want to fish for. My state can pass bag limits and seasons. The federal government has no right whatsoever to do so. Let's see what the courts have to say about it. I will post the GPS numbers I and my team will be fishing at. And harvesting at.

From the Publisher: Meeting Jim Smarr was quite an experience, and one I'm not likely to soon forget. Sporting a mustache that clearly took attention to detail, the man carried character. With my usual (and total) lack of appropriate behavior, when I first caught his eye I asked "Let me guess. You work for the Environmental Defense Fund." His steely glance and a drawl that indicated the dark fluid dirtying the soil in grandma's garden turned out to be Texan Crude (he said "I beg your padon, suh") carried with it a sense of humor I've come to know and cherish in the short time we've known each other. We talk a lot, Jim Smarr and me. You'll learn more about him, but a brief history would tell the tale of a family that traces its Texan blood to the year 1810, and a guy who -- when told he could count the months he had left to breath -- spent a good part of a fortune chasing billfish, drinking expensive whiskey, and living. I'm glad he survived, and did it in style. He's the kind of guy that would rather die while he was living, then live while dead (Jimmy Buffet's word painting, not mine).

We have Bait, Fly, Soft Plastic and Top water fishermen who all seem to have a very different focus. There are some user conflicts arising. One group seems to think the other is taking more than their fair share of fish. Some want to have areas designated for specific use only such as no motor zones or wade fishing only. The tournament fishermen are after the trophy big dollar catch. The guy who occasionally fishes just wants a few fish to have for dinner.

The solution to this overall problem could simply be corrected buy habitat restoration. The Ixtoc oil spill in Mexico caused most of the fourteen historical coastal passes to be closed. Many of these remain closed today. Natural fish passes allow our eco systems to be cleansed by fresh Gulf saltwater flushes. The fresh saltwater inflows via open passes would allow all species to travel to the Gulf to complete their life cycles. All bays sportfish have to make a run to the Gulf to spawn. The closed passes have greatly restricted the ability to maintain healthy populations. During freeze conditions the ability to have warmer Gulf inflows would help maintain bay water temperatures or allow fish to escape to the warmer Gulf waters. With increased Coastal Populations the need to have proper water circulation via currently closed passes to reduce water born pollutants from run off is vital.

I'm asked -- more and more as this incredible story unfolds, what politics have to do with fishing. An article I just found in the The New York Post answers the question. The title of the article? Jobs O Hates. The "O" is our president. The jobs he hates (I thought it was all about jobs, wasn't it?) include one close to my heart. I can't help myself. After mining comes fishing. Who hates fishing??? I thought it was a good thing. Was my Uncle Eddie lying all those years I was growing up? Is that joy I see on the faces of kids learning to fish somehow dark? Now evil?

The New York Post isn't where I would normally look for respite from the slamming we're currently receiving from the Administration, their friends at EDF, their puppets at the Fishery Management Councils, and the environmental progressive left. Until you've been spoken to like an errant student in a classroom (even though you're in your fifth decade as a citizen of the United States and the people treating you like that are actually in no way your intellectual, ethical, moral, or any-al superior), you can't really conceive the ideological attack on our fisheries and with them our way of life. An awakening is in order.

Here's the paragraph from the article (by Ben Lieberman, senior fellow in environmental policy with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC).

What's up with the over-regulation? What's up with being treated like that bad-boy student being told to get out of the classroom? Attitude. Like the attitude of a president that just doesn't like what we do, why we do it, or where we do it. The water belongs to him after all. And we ain't talking "Him".

Take note of the flag on the front of the first boat at the dock in the image used in the article in the Post, though. It's running the RFA flag. It's a sign of the coming together of the recreational and commercial industries in what is apparently a two-side attack. EDF is behind every bit of what's going on. What the article fails to underscore is the close, largely-hidden, and continously-denied relationship between the EDF, NOAA, the Fishery Councils, and the money. Just answer that question and perhaps the truth will begin to show its head, and the rats will leave the kitchen.

Click HERE to Read the entire New York Post article. Fishing's only one of them -- but the one that bothers us the most. It's death by a thousand cuts, though. Just ask the people running family farms throughout our nation. They call their site FarmWars.

It's hard to put a finger on what drives the wild popularity of Deadliest Catch, the Discovery Channel's series about crab fishing in the Bering Sea. Pulling load after load of crustaceans off the bottom of the ocean seems like pretty thin stuff for a runaway entertainment phenomenon. Yet the show has somehow won over more than 4 million viewers and garnered five seasons of red-hot ratings.

Granted, the weekly drama of the Red Bull-guzzling, cigarette-huffing, bleepity-bleeping captains doing battle with 13 million pounds of king crab does give the show a certain NASCAR-worthy je ne sais quoi. But if there's a single secret ingredient behind the show's success, it is the drama of the multimillion-dollar fishing derby -- starring the likes of Phil Harris, spitting blood and tearing his hair out as his boat gradually falls apart around him, and Johnathan Hillstrand, like a Hells Angel behind the wheel of the Time Bandit -- to catch as many crabs as possible before the government drops the checkered flag on the season. Though it's not much discussed on the show, the scramble for crab is just a videogenic symptom of a larger -- and potentially catastrophic -- problem in fishing: Too many boats chasing too few fish.

"You could've had 25 boats easily catching the whole quota," says Edward Poulsen, a second-generation Bering Sea crab fisherman. "But there were 300 boats."

That free-for-all brought a host of problems, from environmental damage caused by carpet-bombing the ocean floor with crab pots, to bankruptcies and a chilling roster of lost fishermen and boats that sank after they ventured out into fierce storms so they wouldn't get left behind in the race. For years, crab fishing in the Bering Sea was the deadliest job in the country -- more likely to kill you than going on foot patrol in Iraq.

But even as the Deadliest Catch rocketed to popularity, the hard lessons of two decades of racing for fish were finally sinking in for fishermen in the Bering Sea, and they were voluntarily agreeing to end the race. You'd never know it from watching the show, but only one season after it hit TV screens, crab fishermen in Alaska began fishing under a new system that permanently divided up the annual catch between all the boats in the fishery.

"The whole dynamic of the fishery has changed," says Kale Garcia, another longtime crab fisherman, who owns a boat called the Aquila.

In the Bering Sea today, the race for crab is now over. But the fishery there is just one ripple in the tide of a revolution that has swept the fishing world over the past 20 years. Today, fisheries for everything from fish-stick staples like whiting and pollock to high-end delicacies like halibut and sablefish operate under "catch share" programs. Many more, including a major groundfish fishery on the West Coast and one in New England, are now following suit. Jane Lubchenco, the marine biologist who now heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which manages the nation's fisheries) has launched a concerted effort to institute catch-share programs in as many U.S. fisheries as possible.

Yet even as the tide rises for catch shares, the fleet and the crews in the Bering Sea are still contending with far-reaching aftereffects -- something not seen on TV, and not much discussed by catch-share boosters.