On Saturday, June 30 Francesco Attesti, a world-renowned pianist, performed at the Boca Grande Community Center to nearly a full house. Randy Wojcik and Bob Melvin, partners at Gasparilla Properties, helped to bring Attesti to the Boca Grande stage and are shown with him above.                      Photo by Dusty

STAFF REPORT - The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has made several important announcements in the last few days that will affect local fishermen and live-aboard boaters.

The last day to register to vote or change party affiliation for this year’s August 13 primary is Monday, July 16.

After that day the registration books are closed, and changes will only apply to subsequent elections.

Last week we printed some comments from stories on our web site, bocabeacon.com, in reference to tarpon preservation. We didn’t have room to run them all, so we thought we would continue this week. The comments below were received after we ran a commentary by Rick Hirsch called “PTTS doing more damage than jigging” that originally ran late last year. Since June’s protest, a lot more people have taken a second look at the piece and expressed their opinion.

These comments are in their unadulterated forms, and have not been changed or altered at all from the web site.

#7 Jig Man 2012-07-02 15:41
You sound like eco-terrorists. A bunch of tree hugging hippies that stand for the crying tarpon. We all know you’re pissed because you’ve been losing charters ever since the PTTS came to town. Just admit its about filling your wallets and not about saving tarpon. If it were REALLY about the tarpon, you wouldn’t omit certain information, like the fact that there are ‘live bait’ tournaments held nightly AFTER the PTTS has a day tournament. Why wouldn’t you cancel the “worlds richest tarpon tournament” instead of hosting it DIRECTLY after another tournament? Doesn’t that hurt the stressed fish even more? Of course it does ... but instead of admitting that fact, you purposefully don’t mention it and then say “well we see dead tarpon the next morning after a PTTS tournament.”