[Gerry Zagorski]

Yes commercials are allowed to keep 14 inch fish.... I'm fine with that since those fish count towards their quota which is in pounds not number of fish... If they had to discard those 14 inch fish that happened to get caught in their net, those fish would not count towards their quota, end up discarded/dead and would be wasted...

Further, people above are doing the math that commercials keep X amount of fish each time they go out and how that is way more then any party boat could possibly catch... The one thing missing in this logic is commercial landings are monitored and counted by weight and once their quota is attained, no matter what the date is, they get shut down... On the recreational side we are given seasons from X date to Y date and can fish all of those days.

As far as quotas, it varies from year to year but right or wrong, commercials usually get a little more then the recreationals do... Last year they got 54% of the quota and we got 46%.

Some of you maybe reading this and think, hmm Gerry's pro commercial fishing.... The reality is there will always be commercial fishing as long as there is demand for fish. Knowing that you just need to be sure the quotas are split fairly, the commercials are monitored closely so they don't exceed their quota and given sensible rules that don't force them to waste the resources with discards, which is why I support allowing them to keep 14 inch fish..