Comment from Hang Nguyen-Musselman

Dear Mrs. Brewster-Geisz and Mr. Dubeck, Thank you for setting up the meeting on November 19, 2009 at the Belle Chasse auditorium in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. I hope that our comments and concerns will help you determine what is best for the conservation of the shark stocks and what is best for the people who make a living from the shark fishery. I fully support the conservation of the sharks and will do whatever I can to conserve and preserve shark species. I am a shark fins dealer. I purchase shark fins from various fish houses and I sell the shark fins to wholesalers. In the process of purchasing and selling the fins I talked with various people in the trade and below are my comments. 1. Having a fixed quota based on the stock assessment is an excellent idea . 2. Given the fixed quotas, it is best not to have a trip limit, but if trip limit is necessary please allow a high trip limit so the fishermen can spread the fixed costs of fuel, ice, labor, length of trip, etc... over a larger amount of catch. This will bring their costs down. Depending on where the fishermen dock, it takes them somewhere between 5 hours to 12 hours to get to the areas where they can fish. 3. A thirty-three (33) shark limit per trip causes great waste. Fishermen will collect their limit and discard the smaller and often already dead sharks in favor of larger ones. Those dead juvenile sharks will never reproduce, and will never be sold. Furthermore they were not counted against the quotas. Increasing the limit from thirty-three (33) sharks per trip to a higher limit like a four thousand (4,000) pounds of shark per trip will reduce waste because fishermen will not be under so much pressure to mitigate the high fixed costs mentioned above. 4. For people like me who only deal with shark fins, a consistent opening date of the shark season is very important. Regardless of whether you open the season in January or in July, please open the season the same month every year so people like m