Bonefish on the Brain Bonefish and all that relates (maybe a bit about tarpon too).

I get it now. Prescott and Minister Gray are from the Underpant Gnome School of Economics.

Phase 1. Get rid of the anglers.
Phase 2. ?
Phase 3. Profit

Get it?

It is sooooo clear to me now.

A tool that I used to use back in my Foundation/Awarding-Grants days was the Logic Model.

A logic model basically starts with an assumption and then maps it out to see if your assumption is likely to be borne out by the actions and resources applied. I’ll walk you through what this might look like for the proposed regulations push.

Assumptions
These regulations will result in an expanded, more sustainable and more profitable flats fishing industry.

Why these assumptions are misguided.

Expanded Flats Fishing Industry: There will be fewer anglers, not more. Assuming you will convert Unguided Anglers into Guided Anglers by passing regulations doesn’t hold water. Instead, you end up losing the Unguided Anglers who would grab a day or two with a guide. You lose anglers who feel the tone and tenor of the regulations are anti-foreigner. You end up losing family vacationers with an angling dad who wants to be able to walk out on a flat by himself. The pool of days and dollars lost is fairly easy to see, but the pool of net-new angler days is harder to identify. The idea that the industry is expanded by turning away anglers has to rely on an assumption other anglers are waiting to go to the Bahamas but just haven’t yet. I don’t see that as true and neither does anyone else outside of the BFFIA and the Fishy Ministry, I mean Ministry of Fisheries. You make the pie smaller the industry doesn’t magically grow, not unless you are some sort of Underpant Gnome.

More Sustainable Fly Fishing Industry: There have been protected areas proposed and worked on by other organizations (The Nature Conservancy and BTT, to name two) and to come now and make those proposals, as if they are totally new ideas and others haven’t been working on them for years is just dishonest. There are many projects and programs working on conservation now (see this list from BTT), so the recommendations from Prescott merely seeks to take control of those efforts, taking control away from others. The big threats are largely not touched upon. Nothing about over-development or bonefish aggregation points being protected. They want to take over training of guides (and that is something totally needed), but even the guys promoting that effort have shown lapses of judgement that call into doubt the ability of the BFFIA to really do something meaningful here.

More Profitable: Fewer anglers = less profit. There won’t be a wholesale conversion of Unguided Anglers to Guided Anglers. It just won’t happen. Independent guides will lose days, maybe a lot of days, from those family trip or DIY/Guided anglers. If prices are raised higher to compensate, even more people will choose other locations. There will still be anglers coming to the Bahamas to fish with lodges, but the total number of days will drop. Which guides are going to lose out? How is the increased profit going to come from fewer angler days?

The Bahamas has been a great DIY location due to the vastness of the flats. No other Caribbean nation has the flats that the Bahamas does. However, if you restrict DIY to the point it is not viable you make those resources indistinguishably from other locations. Add on top of that the bad blood being stirred up and you end up losing a ton of business.

You can’t turn  your clients and customers away and expect that to lead, magically, to all sorts of positive outcomes… unless you are one of these guys…

I just sent my $10 in.

Read this story from Yellow Dog Fly Fishing Adventures about supporting the Abaco Fly Fishing Guides Association.

I believe these guys have the level heads needed to do something positive here. I’d urge you to support them as well.

Abaco Bonefish

A few Androsian fin clips from 2011

Before you can draft laws to protect some type of fish or environment, you need to understand that fish or environment. If you have built a solid scientific understanding of the thing then you can build regulations that work in the long-run.

That’s exactly what the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust has been working to do in the Bahamas. Their Bahamas Initiative has added significantly to the understanding of bonefish, where they live and what they need to survive and thrive.

The Bahamas Initiative.

Instead of looking at what BTT has done and using that science as the basis for reasonable regulation and protection of the Flats and the fish and fisherman who depend on them, the current proposal from the Bahamas Fly Fishing Industry Association seems to go out of its way to dismiss what BTT has already accomplished, even going so far as to cast doubt on the validity of their work.

Excerpts from the BFFIA Proposal:

“This will also assist with more accurate surveys and statistics as to the percentages of Guided and Unguided Anglers frequenting our Country’s Flats and not rely on secondhand surveys or information from Non-Bahamian Entities’ Reports.” BFFIA Recommendations

 

“It is recommended that all mangrove, flats and reef  research should be done through The College of the Bahamas in consultation and in conjunction with BFFIA.   BFFIA suggests that 40% of the Fishing License Proceeds go to conservation and that a Board Member of BFFIA be appointed as  Board Representative on  the Government Conservation Fund Committee.” BFFIA Recommendations

For me, and I’d bet for almost everyone reading this, this stance is just further proof of the xenophobic nature of the proposals put forward by the Prescott Gang.

Man, I hope someone in the Cabinet gets the memo.

We have not won. Notice how we haven’t seen a new written proposal? Notice how the main instigators have gone a bit radio-silent? The intent is still there and what is getting out does not seem to be good.

Despite some assurances coming from unnamed sources in the government that DIY isn’t dead, what isn’t being said is that it might be seriously curtailed. It is seen as a compromise to merely ban DIY from certain Islands or to limit it to certain specified areas. Places like Long Island, Acklins and Mayaguana might be either totally off-limits to non-guided fishing, or may have those DIY boxes that sound like a good way to discourage anglers from going there. Which Islands are being targeted is not clear, but Long and Acklins have been mentioned several times by he-who-must-not-be-named, so they seem shoe-ins for inclusions.

DIY could also be on-foot only, meaning no SUPs or Kayaks (or even being dropped off). There still very well could be no non-guided boats and no non-Bahamian registered boats.

The folks pushing this seem to have gotten a little smarter and are keeping fairly quiet about what they actually want to do. They’ve seen that when their intentions hit the light of day all Hell breaks loose and I doubt the Minister likes all Hell breaking loose. Things are still leaking out, however, and some of those leaks are finding their way to me and I’m telling you.

I think they are just waiting for us to tire, to be distracted by the next shinny trinket (SQUIRREL!). Seems a smart play on their part. We can’t let up, even though it is easy to tire.

We have to keep up the pressure and focus our efforts on the Minister of Tourism, who has some say in what happens to this thing in the Cabinet. Send your emails about what you think these regulations will do to the Bahamas and what these regulations will do to your own travel to the Bahamas to The Hon. Obediah H. Wilchcombe (tourism@bahamas.com).

I hope you like reading… this is a long one.

It has been a while since there has been much news on this front. If you haven’t read this piece from Gink & Gasoline, I’d urge you to.

If your curious about my own biases, I’d direct you here for my own disclosures.

I thought I’d try to wrap it all up in one big go here, tell you what has happened thus far, where they stand now and where I think we are going. I also share a few alternative ideas that are probably horrible, but I’m putting them out there anyway.

Where we stand now

On June 19^th I got an email with a copy of proposals to regulate the flats fishing industry in the Bahamas. Reading through the proposals my eyes took on a look of shock, then horror. It seemed really bad and I said as much. At the same time the same email was being opened and read by others who also arrived at the same conclusion… this was going to be a disaster for the Bahamas. Blog posts started going up, letters started being sent in as part of the “consultation process,” the Bahamian Fly Fishing Industry Association had a meeting and a vote on leadership, a meeting of stakeholders occurred, followed by a second stakeholder meeting.

To my knowledge there is not a second draft version at this time. Many of the items we think will be in the proposed legislation have been discussed by persons in positions of power and authority, but have not been written down or passed around widely. Some of those items might not make it into the proposed legislation, as the Attorney General’s office is tasked with actually writing the legislation.

The proposed legislation will be brought into the Cabinet where it will be discussed and debated. If it emerges from the Cabinet it will go to the House of Assembly where MPs vote after the “Third Reading” of the bill. Then it goes to the Senate and again is voted on (they can delay, but not kill a bill) at the “Third Reading.” That is how I understand the process to work.

There is still a long way for the proposed legislation to go. It has to be written into a coherent bill (this may be difficult to do as many of the terms are vague and other existing laws have to be considered), it has to make it out of the Cabinet (which it very well might fail to do) and it has to be voted on by the Members of Parliament.

A press release by the Ministry of Tourism seemed to say no tourist unfriendly proposal would go through, but it isn’t their proposal, so they wouldn’t be in a position to official kill this thing off. Still, it is hopeful.

What the bill lacks in economic sense it makes up for in nationalism and xenophobia. Such forces cannot be underestimated. Remember, Argentina went to war with the UK over the Falklands.

The most cited Bahamian complaints

The move to regulate flats fishing has many sides and the push comes from a number of commonly cited complaints from Bahamians, as far as I understand them.

1. Foreign Guides – It is claimed a number of foreigners have set up shop to guide in the Bahamas. Certainly, there are a few. I know of one Canadian guide out of Eluthera and one lodge (Bahamian owned) on the West Side of Andros. Maybe there are others. That I don’t know them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
2. Foreign Mother Ship operations – Many guides have said they’ve seen mother ships with four or five skiffs in tow on pirate fishing excursions, not only not employing Bahamian Guides, but instead employing American guides. It is entirely possible such things exist. I don’t see them marketed or talked about, but it could be these are a real issue. They are certainly perceived as an issue.
3. Foreign Illegal Lodges – I have seen claims of lodges being set up in private homes with foreign guides, skirting laws about hotel taxes and other regulations. No one has been able to show me one of these and they certainly don’t have booking agents sending them business or websites to book clients. This is perceived as an issue, although this one feels like more perception than reality, given the complexities in making a lodge actually run and be successful. It could be there are “pop up” lodges with fly shops bringing in their own clients for a week or two at a time. I’m not sure exactly what shape this takes, if it has any shape.
4. DIY anglers – Many guides really, really don’t like the DIY movement. The argument goes that the waters are Bahamian and if you go fishing by yourself you are stealing money from the pockets and food from the mouths of a Bahamian. DIYers bring too much pressure. DIYers ruin the fishery by killing too many of the fish. DIYers get to use the resource for too little money. There are a long list of complaints, and as I’ll discuss a little bit further on, some of them we have brought about ourselves.
5. Bahamian Guides lack respect – No certification, no training program, no piece of paper saying you are a guide means there are none of the solid benefits of being a guide that might come with a more established white-collar profession. Things like bank loans and customs duty exceptions might come if they have that piece of paper.
6. Second home owners – Many of these second home owners bring over boats (wouldn’t you?). The boats give the angler much more access and they start bumping up against guides trying to make a living. The guides see this as a Bahamian waters for Bahamian people issue.

What is in either the draft proposal or has been discussed in one form or another.

First, let’s talk about what is not in the proposals. These are not proposals designed with conservation in mind. There is some light, undefined talk of preserving the resource, but those words are not about the fishery, unless you mean relieving DIY pressure from the flats. There are a number of important issues confronting the flats fisheries… illegal netting, dredging and over-development spring to mind. There are certainly more serious issues facing Bahamian fisheries in general too, such as illegal poaching (placed at the feet of the Dominican Republic for the most part) and illegal poaching from Americans coming over from Florida. An arrest was just made of a couple of American poachers with turtle meat, undersized conch and illegally harvested lobster all seized. This proposal does nothing to address any of these more serious issues. It is not about conservation. These proposals are about the industry and the resource, who can use it and who can profit from it.

Here are the elements I gather as being either in or discussed:

1. A fishing license – This was one of the first red flags, as the original language implied you had to get the permit from a guide or lodge who could arbitrarily deny it to you. It’s easy enough to set up an on-line licensing system, so setting up a system dependent on the guide or lodge seemed to be done intentionally to make it more difficult and to give the guide veto power. It seems we are moving toward a more reasonable fishing permit system, easily accessible and more-or-less affordable. The original proposal was very high, where a second home owner staying for a month might have to pay $2,000. A day, week and annual license, topping out at $250 seems likely, but, again, this hasn’t been put in writing. Probably 95% of the people I’ve talked to have no issue buying a permit to fish as long as it is reasonable and if the money goes to help preserve the resource and not into some political slush fund.
2. DIY restrictions – This has not been written down but I’ve heard the lines have already been drawn in some cases. DIY will be allowed, but only in certain areas. Those areas would be set in consultation with the local guides and lodges. You would be able to DIY, but only where you were told you could. Everything else would be off limits, except to guides, and the fines if you are caught out of bounds could be as much as $3,000. Most of us think this is a non-starter. Restricting DIY to certain areas defined by guides (who have no motivation to give you anything worth fishing) would likely prevent many anglers from making the trip. To be told exactly where we were able to fish and threatened with severe fines if we didn’t comply would end the free spirit and easy going feeling of the Bahamas for many of us. The guides seek, and Fisheries Minister Alfred Gray has vowed to give them “exclusivity on the flats.” So, you can go DIY the Bahamas if this passes, but you’ll be fishing the sloppy seconds in every sense of the phrase.
3. Mother Ships – Those would be finished, unless employing Bahamian guides. Haven’t met anyone who has a problem with that. If those mother ships with foreign guides and a string a skiffs really were invading Bahamian waters, there seem few things that would be a greater insult to Bahamian guides. So, good riddance to that.
4. Foreign Owned Lodges – The original proposals took aim at foreign owned lodges, the language was explicit, although there are some legal complexities here making this part of the legislation more bark than bite. To start a lodge in the Bahamas you need a local partner and you need to make a large investment. There are elaborate regulations for this process. The language certainly is threatening to foreign lodge owners (who operate some of the best known and sought after lodges in the Bahamas), but it is doubtful such massive changes to foreign investment could come from this bill.
5. Certification and Training – There would be a training program and licensing program, for both lodges and guides. This process would be run by the Bahamas Fly Fishing Industry Association, run by Prescott Smith, the main driver of these proposals. The issue here is the political nature of the BFFIA and, in particular, of Prescott. There is opposition to Prescott from many in the Bahamian fly fishing community (there are also those that love the guy and would follow him anywhere) and if this passes it appears Prescott would be given the power to grant or withhold his blessing on a lodge or guide. The lodges and guides who oppose the BFFIA and Prescott would have to pay Prescott for his services as well. The whole thing reeks of politics of the worst sort. It might be a good idea to train guides on handling bonefish, on conservation, on how to be a guide… there certainly is a wide variation in skill, ability levels and levels of professionalism. An official certificate might also come with a duty exemption for fly fishing related gear like boats, trucks, rods, reels and more. So, there is some good in here for guides and lodges, but the “how” remains a huge question mark as Prescott has lost almost all his international credibility and has divided the Bahamian guide and lodge community by his tactics.
6. Second Home Owners – Forget taking your own boat out. You would need a guide, even if you are a permanent resident married to a Bahamian. So says Minister Gray. If you hate flats fishing, there will probably be some properties hitting the market in the next year if this passes all the way through.

How we got here

I’ve been thinking about how we got here. I don’t know all the nuances, but I have been paying attention and here are my thoughts.

1. DIY got too easy. I remember, painfully, the first time I wandered into a forum and asked for a DIY spot in the Bahamas. I was naïve. People didn’t give that stuff away. You had to earn it. You had to go to the place yourself and develop that knowledge which was paid for with hours of fishless flats walking and sunburn. Now, thanks to blogs (like mine) and Google Earth and detailed books you don’t have to work for it. You can just look it up, like Yelping a place to get dinner. In the age of GoPro and Instagram and Vimeo, there are no secrets… not really. So, we all headed for the flats, en masse, and wrote about it and filmed it and took a billion pictures and that inspired others to go and do the same thing. I’m partly to blame and I’m part of the story. One of the first stories that captured my imagination was in This is Fly about a guy who got dropped off on an uninhabited cay in the Bahamas for a week to fish. It was everything I wanted in a trip and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
2. The Business of being a guide has changed. Today it isn’t enough to have a boat, a pair of good eyes and a family name. There’s marketing to be done. Americans (and I’m guessing we are the majority of anglers going out with guides in the Bahamas) are used to being inundated with marketing messages from the brands we follow. Think about where the flats fishing content is for us to follow. It isn’t coming from the guides in the Bahamas. It is coming from the bloggers and clothing brands and DIY guys who go there, film it, photograph it and share it with the world. They are selling the image of the DIY guy largely against the absence of any kind of native Bahamian marketing effort. Bahamian guides are guides, concerned about the cold front that might come in, the cost of gas and the day-to-day of living and working on an island. They aren’t thinking about the cost of customer acquisition and customer loyalty. It used to be loyalty came with a good trip. Now, loyalty has to be constantly sought after and reaffirmed. Ever have a hard time getting a trip confirmed from a Bahamian guide over the phone? Ever had a guide take down your phone number or email address? Yeah… me either. This overly marketed to American consumer is probably different from the American Client of 20 years ago. The business has changed, is changing and will changes some more. The Bahamian guides need some real help in better marketing what they bring to the table or they will continue to lose the marketing battle they may not even be aware they are fighting.

I’m open to new ideas

Now, I’m just going to throw some stuff up on the walls… I won’t claim any of this is really well thought out. I also doubt that those pushing the regulations will be interested in doing anything other than what they are planning on doing already. Still… here are a few ideas to address the main gripe, the DIY angler.

1. We could adopt an informal code-of-conduct in the absence of official regulation. How about avoiding a DIY trip in the heart of the best guiding season? How about not posting which island you visit? How about committing to one day of guided fishing per trip? How about promising to stay in a Bahamian run motel, if you aren’t at a lodge? We could police ourselves a bit better and maybe that would help.
2. In the US we have ways of managing our most impacted and sensitive environments. I’m thinking of things like deer tags and Grand Canyon river permits. There may be some places where there just aren’t enough flats to go around. In that case, how about a lottery system? You apply for a tag for Acklins and see if you get it. Other islands with more flats might be tag-free. If you get the tag you can choose to go through an outfitter for assisted DIY or you could go full DIY. Guides would not need a permit and you could fish at any time with those guides. This might enable these more sensitive areas to be better managed by limiting angler pressure (or at least even figuring out how anglers are even using the resource) and dispersing the impact over time. I’m sure there are problems with this idea, but I’m intrigued by it.
3. The idea of “DIY” areas sucks the spirit out of the trip. However, flipped around and modified a bit, a Guide Only area(s) might not be such a horrible idea. Set aside some areas for the guides to use, manage and profit from exclusively, while still leaving the DIY angler the ability to explore a bit, to find their own water, to spread out. Guide Only areas could be a little bit further away, more boat-accessible. Guides could guide anywhere they want to, but could make special use of the Guide Only areas when pressure becomes too great in other areas.

From Gink & Gasoline today… a really well done piece. This is what it looks like when a journalist gets a hold of an issue like this.

The story.

The clan in Grand Bahama in 2013

“The draft bill and accompanying regulations are not an effort to stifle, prevent or prohibit any category of anglers from fly fishing within the Islands Of the Bahamas, or to restrict international investor participation in the sector.”

So says a Ministry of Tourism press release.

This thing might not have the legs it needs to get through the cabinet. In fact, there seems to be a swelling of internal opposition to the proposals as people wake up to the realities and potential economic pitfalls.

So… we might be able to, in not too long, collectively breath a sigh of relief. Maybe. Depending. At least, well, there’s a good chance. (How many outs can I give myself in one paragraph?)

Underlying what might, just might, be the successful offing of the horribly thought out and disastrously presented proposals, there may be a few issues we need to discuss and consider.

The bill’s popularity with some is grounded in the stark realities they are facing. Consider the bill would have provided duty exemptions for guides for items such as boats, trucks, fly rods and reels, etc.. That would help guides get better, newer gear to grow their businesses for something closer to market rates instead of the hugely inflated costs once you add transportation AND duty costs.

The move to effectively ban most DIY was popular with many guides and they had their reasons. We might do well to examine what those reasons are. Maybe things have become a bit too easy on the DIY front. Maybe not everyone who heads out to one of the Out Islands acts like a perfect gentleman. Maybe we need to think about how we can help the Bahamians to better promote themselves and their services.

The ban on mother ships, ban on foreign guides and the introduction of a reasonably priced and easy to obtain fishing license were all widely supported elements of the proposal. If just those bits survived, they would be welcomed by the vast majority (assuming the money went towards conservation or preserving the fisheries).

If this thing does die, and let’s hope it does, we may need to think about what other elements need to be resurrected, changed, and re-proposed.

Those proposals almost certainly can’t come from the current leadership of the BFFIA, who have lost international respect and proven to be the most divisive of leaders. Even if you are for the proposals, you have to think the presentation and roll-out has been nothing short of a disaster and if you don’t know whose feet to lay that disaster at, you are willfully blind.

So, let’s keep up the pressure. Let’s let the other stakeholders know how we feel and let’s try to do a little introspection of our own and see what has merit, what doesn’t, and what we can do to make our impact a little softer on those who have felt wronged by the current state of affairs.

Andros South in the morning.

Happy in the Bahamas

For my day job I often find myself at medical conferences listening to doctors (I’m not one) give presentations. Before a doctor gets on stage and tells you about their research or case report they first give you their disclosures. They let everyone know up front if they’ve taken money from the drug company or if they have a private lab engaged in research or selling competitive services. They want to let people know their possible biases before they start so the information that follows can be assessed in context.

Here are my disclosures. I am not a guide (I guided for trout in Northern California for one season in my early 20’s). I am not a lodge owner, or part owner. I don’t own land in the Bahamas. I don’t own a boat in the Bahamas. I do know some Bahamian guides and some Bahamian and American lodge owners. I’ve fished out of both. The Bahamas has only been a travel destination for me for about 5 years. I was kind-of-almost working for a booking agent for a hot minute when I was between jobs two years ago, but I didn’t end up actually working there and never made a dime off of the work.

Mainly what I have invested in the Bahamas is interest and dreams. The Bahamas are one of my favorite destinations and I have chosen the Bahamas for family vacations, two lodge-based trips and a couple DIY/Guided trips, all in the last five years. I figure I and my family have spent around $20,000 in the Bahamas over that time. I have been to and fished out of Grand Bahamas, Andros, Abaco and Long Islands.

My interest far outweighs my experience and that interest has led me to talk to a lot of people about the Bahamas and to read about the Bahamas to make up for my lack of physical presence. I’ve done interviews and shared stories about the Bahamas consistently for the past five years as well. Ever since the blog was launched, I’ve been talking about and sharing stories about the Bahamas.

My first bonefish came from the East End of Grand Bahama with an independent guide.

In short, I have no “skin in the game.” If the proposed regulations pass I stand to gain nothing financially. If they don’t pass I stand to gain nothing financially.

If they do pass, what I lose are some dreams, maybe a bit of my muse would be snuffed out. I’d lose a family vacation spot and a bit of happiness. That’s all.

My rather strong voice of alarm and concern stems from my worries about what these regulations will do to the Bahamas and to their people. I see economic hard times if these pass. It could be that I also see a loss of something I love as well, a loss of freedom and a loss of choice.

Now you know my biases and where I come from and can put what I have to say in context.