Alot of us are well aware of the problem currently with the overfishing in the gulf, especially the hammour. If your not I strongly suggest you read atleast this article..

The hammour is now at risk of extinction more than you would expect. The municipality claims they are aware and working on the problem, but as we all know they have made similar claims and seem to not take action until there is a widescale awareness of the problem whether international, national, or even city wide.

Over the next month or so I will be working on reevaluating the fishing laws in the UAE, and work on different tactics I/we can use to get things rolling and in effect.

The fishing licenses are a joke, we need fish and game wardens with enforcers, this may be difficult at a sport and leisure fishing level, but it would be very simple for this to be enforced at the fish markets, and common fishing boat ports.

First step is creating and signing a petition, I took the liberty to do this, and I would be greatful if you guys spent a minute to go to it here (petition url). This is a good way to get a rolling start. If you have the time or are interested send it to some friends, or even just talk about it.

I'm currently working on an article I will be looking to get published if possible. This is a good opportunity for me because I think I can use it somehow for credit in school. This is also a good opportunity for you to keep fishing and eating this fish for years to come.

Once again the petition can be found here:

Hammour in Peril

Give a Damn,
Casey Chambers

Hi Kinks, a very important subject. Apart from bag limits and minimum sizes in Australia we also have strict limits on the larger fish.eg you might be able to catch 5 of a species, but only one of them would be able to be over 50cm. This is to protect the breeding stock. One of our fish is the humble flathead, very popular and good eating, these can get so large they are nicknamed lizards. It seems that once they reach a certain size they all become female so keeping many bigger fish has a disproportionate effect on the breeding population. Luckily many fisherman respect this and return all large fish. Keep up the good work, Cheers, Dave.

Theres finally been some sort of breakthrough making the new limit for hammour 45cm. Its a start but thats still not a very big fish. At that size they have reproduced once which really isn't enough at this point. The limit should easily be over 50-60cm for this fish, I personally catch 45cm hammour inshore average. These fisherman also fish mainly offshore so I really don't understand the logic behind that amount.

But Also apparently there will be some sort of enforcement policy. I think it will be people monitoring the catches of the commercial boats. I really hope there will be some sort of fish farming program to introduce new fish to repopulate, because a this point I think thats all that will really help.

For you that haven't fished here long enough, it may be hard to understand why this issue is so important. To put things into consideration, the population has dropped to 3% of what it used to be...