After Florida voters outlawed most commercial fishing nets in the election of November 1994, sportsmen rose in unison across the Gulf of Mexico. Marshalled by the sport-fishing industry's Coastal Conservation Association, recreational anglers in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana demanded that their own states Ban the Nets!
With a national "fish crisis" media campaign as backdrop, hysteria over a threatened invasion by out-of-work commercial fishermen from the Sunshine State presented sportsmen in the three central-Gulf states with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and they weren't about to take "no" for an answer.
The battles raged over the spring and summer of 1995. Fishery managers in Louisiana and Mississippi buckled under the sportsmen's incessant clamoring, and the future looked bleak for Alabama's family fishermen as well.
Then the cream rose to the top.
Virtually every one of Alabama's institutions, including its natural resource management agency, media, legislators, even the governor, did their parts to help preserve the public's sustainable fishery. And in so doing, they made this characteristically hidebound state appear downright progressive—A Different Breed of Cat.