December 4,  2009




Jenga is a family game of skill and thought, and it may be played at one of your family’s or friend’s holiday get-togethers or at the local frat house with a few adult beverages on the table.

Milton Bradley’s game of Jenga is relatively simple in concept. The players assemble a tower 18 stories tall, using rectangular, wooden blocks. The players then begin to remove blocks from the tower’s base and replace them on top of the tower. Eventually the removing or replacing of a block will lead to the collapse of the tower.

The game is easy, suspenseful and fun for all ages. But, what if you up the ante and go for high stakes Jenga?

“How so?” you are asking.

Well, let’s make the tower out of the blocks that form Hatteras and Ocracoke islands’ economy, and we will see how many blocks we can remove before the tower crumples.

Now, in this game any block that is removed must be replaced by a whole new block on top. This will represent the replacing of one economic base with a whole new economic concept.

The stakes in this game of Jenga are worth millions upon millions of dollars, and the livelihoods of thousands of people.

Are you willing and ready to play? Don’t fret. If you're not up to this game with so much on the line, there are plenty lining up to play, and you will find that most of them will not be affected by the outcome.

In this ongoing game of high-stakes Jenga, the money is very real, but the players can still walk away, win, lose, or draw and afford to play again another day, because they are not playing with their own money.

This game has numerous players and all of them are special-interest, environmental groups. The players are in high speed and chipping away at the base of the tower, methodically and ruthlessly. Every move that is made is given great thought, and if a block will not come out easily, then they will take a 10-pound hammer to it.

Hatteras and Ocracoke islands find themselves being beat up in this game. Both islands saw a huge hole in the blocks from a loss in beach access, which resulted in economic loss from the average tourist, fisherman, and all-round recreational user. These blocks didn’t come easily, so the players pulled out their hammer and hit the blocks with a federal lawsuit. The blocks all but crumpled and disintegrated under the pressure.

The players are still working on the beach access issue. They are not done with that area just yet, even while moving on to other areas of the tower’s base.

The players want some blocks that represent access to our only highway and bridge that provide land access to Hatteras Island --and these blocks are not coming willingly. So, it is expected that the special interest groups will pull out their hammer in the near future and take a swing.

Some players are now moving after commercial gill net fishing. 

This group of players includes members of the Coastal Conservation Association, Coastal Fisheries Reform Group, and the Center for Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation. They too have found resistance in getting their blocks out, so they have announced that if the blocks don’t come out willingly, then they will use their hammer on Dec.18.

These groups believe that gill netting is harming red drum, speckled trout, waterfowl, and thousands of sea turtles in North Carolina waters each year. They claim that there is a shortage in the recreational red drum and speckled trout fisheries, yet the anglers on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands have had no issue catching these fish if they were targeting them.

Most of the red drum we were catching during this fall were between 1 and 7 years old, based on their size range. If we were catching fish in this age group in numbers not seen in some time, then it has to be due to conservation efforts from the past, and this would mean that those efforts are working.

My friends and I had no issue catching speckled trout every day of the week that was fishable from March of this year until today. Speckled trout are a finicky fish, and mastering catching these fish takes years of experience. Those who are really good at it rarely talk about their exploits. But, I guess these conservation and environmental groups expect the numbers of these fish to be so great that one can walk out and snag a speckled trout in the back, rather then actually having to fish for it.

The truth is that the recreational fishermen harvest three times more red drum and speckled trout than the commercial fishermen each year, but the argument is that these species are worth more money in the recreational fishing economy than they are in the commercial economy.

So, if I understand this correctly, it is better for recreation fishermen to kill these species than commercial fishermen because the recreational industry can make more money from killing the fish.

Yeah. That makes good sense.

Let’s prevent the commercial fishermen from doing their job so that we can make more money for ourselves.

This is one greedy form of thinking and this is coming from a person who makes his entire living from recreational fishing.  Go figure.

Yes, there is some loss of fish, waterfowl, and turtles during this harvest. But there is loss of birds, wildlife, and habitat, every time you grab that piece of paper to write on or the toilet paper you reach for in the restroom and yet companies still cut down trees everyday.

For the most part, everything the people of this world do and enjoy impacts the wildlife and environment, but in most cases, the people have learned how to lessen the impact and restore the lost numbers through innovative ideas and techniques, while preserving the needs of everyone.

Commercial fishermen have had decades of rules and regulations imposed on them that have greatly lessened the impacts of commercial fishing. The time has come to stop taking away from them and introduce new ideas and techniques to address the claimed losses, so that both the recreational and commercial fisherman can coexist.

These environmental groups have a hard time with some of the decisions by the North Carolina Department of Marine Fisheries and how that agency balances the needs of recreational and commercial fishermen. The DMF is like all state and federal management agencies in America. It has lost funding over the past 20 years, and it struggles financially to introduce new ideas on a regular basis.

I wonder if the thought of donating the money that these groups would spend on a lawsuit to agencies to help fund more new ideas ever occurs to them?  Sure, but only if they are the ones that directly gain from it. It’s never to help balance the needs of the user groups.

All of these groups, no matter their agenda, use the same old process and game plan for getting what their members want. It is taken from the book “Special Interests for Dummies.”

First, you must find a writer or editor to show a picture of dead wildlife in a written piece about the current cause and combine that with some twisted data and misinformation --propaganda, if you will -- in order to win the hearts of the public. Upon winning the support of the public, you then use said support as leverage to twist the hands of the politicians into doing whatever you so desire.

And, if all else fails, then sue everybody. Like I said, it’s methodical and ruthless.

So, I am sure that the NCDMF will not strip the commercial gill netters of their ability to use such methods by Dec. 18. Thus, the next 10-pound hammer is soon to fall.

There are many people, both residents and visitors, who believe no one group can destroy our Jenga tower. And I agree, as long as it is not the blocks for our highway or bridge.

However, this game has been played solely with the removal of blocks. There have been no new, viable economic concepts returned to the top of the structure.

This has been only a game of loss.

So, you must ask yourselves that  while no one block can destroy the structural integrity, how long will it be before all the empty spaces add up and lead to the toppling of our much needed tower?

No matter how long this takes, there are going to be winners, and if more residents and visitors do not become active players, Hatteras and Ocracoke islands will topple.



FOR MORE INFORMATION:

You can read more about the proposed gill net closing by following this link:

http://cfrgnc.blogspot.com/2009/11/north-carolina-sportsman-magazine-op.html



(Rob Alderman is the host and producer of the” The Outer Banks Angler” fishing program and the owner of The Outer Banks Angler store located in Buxton. You can find out more on his adventures at www.OuterBanksAngler.com.)

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