More oil! More fish! Remove the off-shore drilling ban now!
NO FISH FOR OIL!!!!!
I've fished while tied up to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and can assure you that the fish love it there. The captain called them vertical reefs.
"There are 27 oil and gas platforms along the California coast and approximately 6,000 worldwide."
Having been occupationally located at more than 100 of the 6000, I can assure you that the fishing is GREAT at every one of them. It is fallacious to pretend otherwise.
This is a big huge "DUH"!!!!!!! The rig fishing in the gulf off the mouth of the Mississippi has been outstanding for years. They make the best reefs. You could get tired pulling them in before you ran out of fish.
Red snapper [insert joke here].
Rockfish? paging Gandolph Fitch...
Scuba divers off the Texas Gulf Coast love it for just that reason.
Rockfish is the name used in the Carolinas for the species we in the northeast call striped bass. "Stripers" have been successfully transplanted to the Pacific coast, but I'm guessing that the rockfish referred to in the article is something different.
Yes, I think that the momentum is shifting on offshore drilling --- even the Washington Post has written an editorial supporting its expansion.
I lived in Santa Barbara decades ago, and I had a nice ocean view from my modest apartment. I think it rented for $450 a month, and it would probably rent for $1,250-odd now but I digress.
This will really distress environmentalists, but when I was in my apartment, I could see the oil rigs and during the evening, as the light faded away and the twinkly lights started coming on in the oil rigs, I thought it was a beautiful sight - the sea, the oil rigs and the lights.
I thought the rigs actually enhanced my ocean view instead of detracting from it.
Maybe I'm just strange :-).
D
If the oil platforms didn't exist there wouldn't be a beach from the Channel Islands to the Mexican border that wouldn't be covered with tar.
The rigs at Santa Barbara, Long Beach and Seal Beach relieved the gas pressure that used to force thousands of barrels of oil to the surface every day.
When I was a kid in the 40s and went to the beach the first stop coming back was the tin washtub, kerosene and and scrub brush before I was allowed in the house to get the tar off of me.
Even in the 60s you couldn't cross the Horseshoe Kelp without getting the sides of the boat covered with oil and there was an oil slick from there to the Mexican border.
My guess is that there isn't 2% of the population of California that went to the beach in those years and have any idea about what they are bitching about.