Massive Poaching Case Raises Questions About Enforcement

The word "poaching" has a small-scale, even homey feel. It evokes men sneaking into the woods to kill a few extra deer before hunting season, or yanking a couple illicit fish into a rowboat.

But there was nothing small-scale or homey about the illegal fishing operation Natural Resources Police uncovered last week off the southern tip of Kent Island. With grappling hooks, they pulled up hundreds of yards of illegal gill nets that had snared 10 tons of rockfish.

This was the largest such seizure by the Natural Resources Police in at least a quarter-century - an industrial-scale attempt to loot a bay resource that, while now in good shape, was once fast-diminishing, and could be threatened again.

This takes money out of the wallets and food off the tables of law-abiding watermen. An individual watermen is allowed 300 pounds of rockfish a day. The 20,016 pounds of poached fish were the equivalent of 67 working days on the water. This, together with the legal haul in the first two days of fishing in February, took up so much of the monthly quota that state authorities shut down gill-net fishing for rockfish until at least the end of the month.

While it's good news that the nets were found, it's not so encouraging that those responsible may never be caught. When the nets were first detected, an overnight police stakeout failed to snare the perpetrators - and it's hard to get a conviction for this crime if people are not caught red-handed.

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