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Alabama anglers go “high tech” during red snapper season

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The Alabama Red Snapper fishing season is here and there is an app for that. The annual event began a week ago and will run during weekends lasting four-days each. Anglers can cast their lines Fridays through Mondays until a quota is met of one point one two million pounds. That where the smart phone app comes in. Scott Bannon is with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. He says anyone catching red snapper is required to report it with the Snapper Check app.

“It’s a big OA when you go to the app store,” said Bannon. “Your licenses are stored there and some other things but use that snapper check app. It asks a couple of questions. The hardest question is what is what is your Alabama registration number but once you put that in there, if you keep fishing from the same vessel, it will store that information.”

Bannon anticipates it will take until next month to fill the whole Red Snapper quota.

Using high technology and smart phones may help the issue of keeping track of this year’s catch. But Bannon says there are certain things even a cell phone APP can’t fix.

“Things such as weather potentially this year fuel prices may be a negative impact to the fishing season and so what we do is we just make a weekly summary at outdoor Alabama dot com and show people where we are in the quota,” Bannon said.

Anyone catching red snapper is required to report it through the Snapper Check APP. Bannon encourages everyone to download the Outdoor Alabama app onto a smartphone in order to report your catch immediately.

Joe Moody is a senior news producer and host for Alabama Public Radio. Before joining the news team, he taught academic writing for several years nationally and internationally. Joe has a Master of Arts in foreign language education as well as a Master of Library and Information Studies. When he is not playing his tenor banjo, he enjoys collecting and listening to jazz records from the 1950s and 60s.
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