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Full Interview with Sassafras LA - 2

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RC: My birthday was May 7, which was not long after the oil spill.  My 16^th birthday, I requested two overnight tuna fishing trips.  And we got about thirty miles out and the oil was supposed to have not even come close to us and I think we had just hit blue water (with the river we have the different color water as we go out and we just hit blue water) and we looked and we seen some supply boats working, you know, but we could tell they weren’t working for a rig, they were doing something out of the usual.  And we were like, “Ah, man, that can’t be.”  And we kept going and kept going and we looked down, and the water had an orange sheen over it and we ran for about ten miles before we got out of it and continued our trip.  I mean we still caught plenty of fish, but that’s what sucked.  We went out, we went out and caught 55 blackfin tuna, 2 yellowfin tuna, our limit of amberjack, a few other fish.  We got a good taste, the fish was going to be good this year.  Get back home, start planning to make another fishing trip and that closure zone just shut us out.

But as for like the offshore fish and all, I fish very often, sportsman mainly offshore and I don’t think it affected the offshore fish. If anything they’re a lot bigger because they’ve been really cutting down on our fishing because they say the oil killed a bunch of them, but as for the offshore fish, they moved away, they’re smart.  With all the fishing closures, the fish were able to move out of the way of the oil and it actually helped the fishing population.  This year when we went fishing, we hammered, I mean we caught plenty of fish.  A couple of state records were broken, I actually was privileged to break a state record on a fish, a yellow-edged grouper.

I was reading up on the internet, the red snapper season, they said that the poundage of their quota, the recreational fishermen caught over because the fish have increased in size due to not fishing.  And the amberjack population, too.  We go to these rigs where we used to go and catch 30-pound amberjack.  The problem, we having trouble dragging these fish out of the rigs because they’re coming up 70 pounds now. 

AN: And at the same time it kind of worries me. I worry maybe that say the dispersants or other things used kind of inflicted. Here we’re fishing all of the ones that survived, but what happens to maybe their offspring? Or the other things that we can’t see under the water?  I mean, it’s great now, but I’m worried to see what will happen.  Not just with the fishing, with the industries, but also a lot of people were getting sick and they think it’s because of the dispersants, so the health issues and those issues, you never now.  People can say, “Well, there’s nothing that’s going to happen,” but you won’t know until it happens.

CG: The dispersants and all, that’s, that’s still on the bottom of the Gulf, that’s still there.  That’s sketchy business.  Scientists can say what they want. Because we know it’s still there, nobody can fool us.  And, like I said, really nobody knows the effects, nobody knows what it’s going to happen in 20 years.

AN: Let’s hope it’s all good.

CG: It’s still a sticky situation.  Literally. 

RC: I think they caught some shrimp that were, had no eyes.

AN: There were some deformities.

RC: There’s the coral growth on the rigs. I was watching a video, I think, the fifteen feet or thirty feet of coral growth was dead, but it was at a perfect line.  They were saying that was from the oil.

CG: I kind of think that there are still some things that we will see for a while because nobody knew how to approach this. So the steps that were taken, who knows if they were effective, if they were safe.

AN: And that’s one thing, when I was going to be traveling to Alaska. It all started off, the Prince William Sound Science Center has an oil spill awareness-type training, and Caroline and I both applied for it the past two years. Last year I was able to go to the Wetlands Expedition, but I was preparing myself and everybody was telling me it wasthe same exact thing as the Exxon Valdez.  It’s not.  Completely different and I’m still working on a project to explain what I learned and compare the two.  I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but eventually it will. We have different climate, we have different bacteria, you know, Alaska’s a lot colder, down here we have the sun and the warmth to break up things, it’s totally different. Also the land formations, rocks and a lot of those things where we have a lot of sediment, easier to penetrate. That’s one thing we’re making sure people know, we’re completely different.  Yes, they may be treated in some ways the same.  Eventually we need to rewrite the laws and the rules on how to engage in say a situation like this to save not only the earth and the ground and also the youth and adults how to deal with all those things.