That 17-day season for red snapper caught off Texas will be the shortest allowed off the five Gulf states under the final federal rules announced this past week, Mississippi and Alabama will have a 34-day snapper season, Florida will see a 26-day season and anglers fishing federal waters off Louisiana will be able to retain red snapper through June 24.Īnd that disparity is behind the lawsuit scheduled to be heard Friday in Brownsville. The addition of 186,000 pounds to the annual recreational quota was behind NMFS' move to add five days to the recreational snapper season off Texas, bumping the season from 12 to 17 days. Thursday, NMFS published the final rules for the 2013 red snapper season, incorporating into the regulations an increase in the annual quota of red snapper allowed to be taken from the Gulf under the federal management plan designed to rebuild the red snapper population.īecause red snapper stocks have been increasing after bottoming out in the 1990s - a plunge blamed on a combination of overfishing by commercial and recreational anglers and the loss of juvenile snapper to shrimp trawls - federal officials increased the annual snapper quota for recreational anglers to 4.145 million pounds, up from 3.959 million pounds in 2012. Earlier this year, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the branch of the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with authority to set fishing regulations for marine waters under federal control, announced Texas would see a 12-day snapper season. The 17-day red snapper season is more than Texas anglers were told to expect. This past year, the recreational red snapper season ran 46 days, then a record for brevity. Either way, it will be the briefest open season for red snapper since federal officials ended year-round fishing for the hugely popular reef fish in 1996. ![]() ![]() At worst, they'll have a 17-day season, ending at 12:01 a.m June 18. But no matter the outcome of Friday's hearing in a lawsuit Texas and Louisiana filed against the federal agencies and officials setting fishing regulations governing red snapper harvest, this will be the shortest recreational red snapper season anglers have ever seen.Īt most, Texas anglers will get around 25 days to land a measly two-fish-per-day limit of red snapper.
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