Red snapper bust's details are mind boggling, disgusting

It’s mind-boggling, and quite disgusting, the details in the report of a bust made last week along the coast of Louisiana.

Veteran charterboat skipper David Harrelson, deckhand Donald Humphrey and 18 out-of-state fishermen on the 65-foot long “Captain Charlie” were issued 96 citations Monday night when they returned to the dock at Bayou Fourchon with more than 900 red snapper in ice chests.

“Even if the season was open they could have only had 40 fish legally,” Capt. Sammy Martin, regional commander with the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Division, told the Daily Comet.

The enforcement agents seized 27 ice chests (mostly 150-quart models) and counted 909 red snapper weighing 2,459 pounds. It took them nearly seven hours. Two hundred and eighty-seven of the fish were less than 16 inches long.

The red snapper season opens June 1 with a daily bag limit of two fish measuring at least 16 inches long per person.

The 20 men were cited for taking fish during a closed season, taking over the limit of a species and taking undersized fish, all federal and state regulations. Martin expects the case to be tried in federal court.

The out-of-staters also were charged with fishing without nonresident basic and saltwater fishing licenses.

What was Harrelson thinking? An established charter boat captain ought to know better, huh?

His 18 clients were from Georgia. They told him, according to what he said in The Advocate, they didn’t care about regulations or the fact the season was closed.

Harrelson said in The Advocate, “There was only one fish in our boxes, and it was a legal lemonfish. These guys bring their own ice chests and what they catch goes into their ice chests. They don’t share their fish.

“I tell them the rules and what they can keep and what they can’t keep. What I was taught years ago was that I was responsible for what goes in my (ice) box, and what goes in their boxes they’re responsible for it.”

The agents who boarded his boat, he said, asked to see the fish and went straight to one of the 27 ice chests that weren’t his, he said.

The state agency sold the red snapper for  for $9,221.25. Standard procedures allow for the sale of seized fish, a department spokesman said.

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Those Catahoula Bass Association members who did so well at Toledo Bend last weekend at the Louisiana Best 6 returned with more than the highest finish among bass clubs in the Teche Area.

Mac Aguillard, captain of the six-member team, said they also brought back two ice chests full of sac-a-lait (up there they call them white perch or crappie) they caught in the evening off a lit boat dock at Griffin’s Lodge. Aguillard said they used hair jigs and Crappie Nibbles to catch fish ranging from 1 to 1 1/2 pounds.

DON SHOOPMAN is outdoors editor of The Daily Iberian.