Southern Offshore Fishing
            Association

In a recent post on one of the S.O.F.A. blogs, there is a quote from a letter that Stephen Bartlett, a Panhandle Dive Shop owner, dive master, commercial fisherman, charter fisherman, and spear fisherman wrote recently.  The guy owns N2Deep Dive Shop in Apalachicola and has been diving and fishing the area waters for more than a decade.  Of course, what he has seen isn't as important to the NMFS as what some scientist making a "research cruise" paid for by a government grant happened to see when he made some failed attempts to catch a few fish to come up with data.  Hell, Steve's a fisherman four or five times over, he's GOT to be a liar, right?

From Steve's letter to the Gulf Council:

In the past 10 years I have seen a steady increase in the percentage of red snapper on the reefs and natural bottom. Ten years ago if you were diving on a wreck off of Frankin County,  FL  you would see a few reds (snappers) swimming around checking you out.
We dove 4 different sites on Jan 23 2009 . It felt like we were being stalked by a school of red piranhas. we are not talking a few, we are talking thousands of them. Most of the fish were between 19 and 30 inches.

The Blog Post