Next time they discuss stripping away more fishing and hunting opportunity, GO!! Get on the mailing list and attend some of the stakeholder meetings in Sacramento. The drive from here sucks. I used to leave at 3:30 am and drive like shit up the 5 to make the 9-10 am meetings. I'd stop for a burger on the way home and get back around 7 pm. But I'm getting too old and too retired for this crap.
The group that attends the various meetings varies, but I can categorize them quickly. The activists are led by one or two organizers who have graduate degrees and connections to animal rights fanatics and sympathetic politicians. They come prepared with biased facts, a tilted agenda, and a half dozen members of their fan club. They know how to speak. The sportsmen are a disorganized bunch, a few groups, a lot of singles, who come unprepared, without scientific facts or connections, and lack basic debate skills. They usually want nothing to change and present some argument like,"This is the way it was and it should stay that way." The meeting will be led by a career employee with experience at listening to both sides and will usually manage to keep the two sides from killing each other, in the building. The policy writers working for F&G are young kids, two or three years out of some 4-year state college where they were schooled by left-wing professors with their own agendas. I know that's a general description but it's not too far off base regardless of the game.
Be prepared with alternatives and some smart policy suggestions when it's being written, not after it's codified.
As an example of a successful campaign to tilt a policy change toward sportsmen, when a well-heeled animal rights activist went after unregulated coyote hunting about 10 years ago, F&G had an unchecked box they wanted to fill. There was no bag limit listed. There was no season. The coyote huggers demanded a change because all hunting requires a license and is regulated. Fair enough. Hunters wanted "no changes. It's always been this way. Nuff said." You get it. Idiot shit. So when it came to a season, some smart fellow asked for July 1 to June 30, the whole year, the same as the license year. And since they had to have a limit listed in the book, someone else who overheard the conversation during the break, asked for "No Limit" to be written into the code. So F&G got to check the box. Coyote hunting had a proposed season and bag limit. Coyotes were regulated and still "nothing changed."
I'd have to think about what rules I'd have wanted for the GWS. "No hook or trolled bait over 5 lbs" would have been a reasonable suggestion. The chum rule sucks, since every boat with live bait bleeds scales and bait stink. And bloody decks draw sharks. Every experienced fisherman knows that. Some rule about hanging half a tuna over the side might have been an alternative. However, the kids who are writing policy are not fishermen or hunters, they're children. "The Gentle Art of Communicating with Kids" by Suzette Elgin would be a good guide since from experience I can say talking like an adult doesn't work with either the sportsmen or the policy writers.
If you're going to play the game, read "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky. Both Barack and Hillary wrote their graduate theses on community organizing. It's an eye-opener, the rule book on winning at politics. If you know the rules, you can shove them right back down the eco-weenies throats.
The activists always send some woman who is 5 foot nothing to present their case. The sportsman usually have a bunch of bearded men 6' 3" and 280 pounds present theirs. Right out of the gate it's a bunch of big men bullying a little girl. This stuff is hard to win.
