bureaucratic stress and mindless, endless paperwork
bureaucratic stress and mindless, endless paperwork
The permit process out of Mexico is...in a word, inexplicable.
If you are of a logical mind, you will never understand it.
As of now, clarions are legal for the one permit still viable but protected by a 6 month hurricane season that keeps everyone close to home. The permit will end as the hurricane season does.
Still, there will be some here and there from other places thruout the range which is bigger then anyone knew before.
Starfish, hawkfish, wrasses, puffers and another common 100 species are right now illegal....as they are governed by the other permitting agency who has simply taken their time to make the permits.
Once, we recieved a permit the week it expired as it took the whole year to render it after approved. Then, after that final week , it took another 6 months to get back online again..!
Divers and partners suffer and die thru the years of waiting for permits to come thru.
I have had close to 15 permits thru the years but they get harder and harder to procure as the bureacracy marches to its own music. Various government bodies must be sheparded to align and sign off on all this.
In the years we do without permits, we lose momentum, gear, depreciated equipment etc.
Divers have to work elsewhere and biologists and managers have to be funded to keep up the fight for the permits. Thousands and thousands are spent every year wether we ship or not fighting for the permits in this chaotic and unpredictable environment.
There are no normal people in this process as only crazy people stick thru it to the sometimes pleasant end.
Usually however, we are alone with no support as until the permits come thru, we are desperate and irrelevant.
I only wish my last partner Arturo could have been here for this years fruitfull events....as I said, he died of bureacratic stress and chronic, mindless, endless politics and paperwork.
He helped to enable the current success.
Steve
