Healthy fisheries don’t happen by accident. Neither does a 40-year partnership between anglers and the water they fish.
It started with fourteen anglers and a tackle shop.
In 1977, commercial overfishing along the Texas coast had decimated redfish and speckled trout populations so severely that recreational anglers could barely find them. Fourteen concerned anglers gathered in a local tackle shop and decided to do something about it. They formed the Gulf Coast Conservation Association, launched the “Save the Redfish” campaign, and four years later had outlawed gill nets along the Texas coast and gotten both red drum and speckled trout declared game fish.
Fourteen people in a tackle shop changed the trajectory of marine conservation in America.
Today that organization is the Coastal Conservation Association (CCA) and it has grown into one of the most effective recreational fishing advocacy and conservation organizations in the country, with over 125,000 members across chapters on the Gulf, Atlantic, and Pacific coasts. The fish are different depending on where you are, but the challenges facing them are often the same: destructive commercial gear, degraded habitat, and fisheries management that doesn’t keep pace with science.
CCA has been showing up for those fights for nearly fifty years.
A win in Texas became a movement across three coasts.
The “Save the Redfish” victory proved something the recreational fishing community had never proven before: organized anglers could take on entrenched commercial interests and win. That victory launched chapters all along the Gulf Coast, then up through the South and Mid-Atlantic, then to the Pacific Northwest, then California. In 2026, CCA has chapters in states on three coasts, all united by the same mission CCA has carried since 1977: ensuring the health and conservation of marine resources and anglers’ access to them.
For CCA, protecting the fish and protecting your right to fish for them have always been the same mission.
The fish don’t have a lawyer. CCA is the next best thing.
When CCA outlawed gill nets in Texas, the redfish came back. When they helped pass Florida’s statewide gill net ban by voter referendum in 1994, the flounder, trout, pompano, and Spanish mackerel rebounded so quickly it surprised even the people who fought for it. Along the way they won game fish protections for sailfish and marlin, and got tarpon a no-harvest regulation in Texas in 1991. Species by species, state by state, CCA has been changing the outcome for the fish that serious anglers build their lives around.
These are the fish Contender owners chase. And CCA is the reason many of them are still out there.
The fights are ongoing. In North Carolina, CCA filed a lawsuit against the state in 2020 asserting that large shrimp trawlers were dragging heavily weighted nets that damage habitat and—according to CCA’s legal filing—kill close to a billion juvenile finfish every year. That case is still moving through the courts.
Four ways CCA goes to work for the fishery.
Building the habitat the fish need to thrive.
Advocacy wins seasons and protects access. But the fish still need somewhere to live. That’s where CCA’s Building Conservation Trust comes in.
The BCT funds habitat restoration and creation projects on all three coasts. Off Galveston, Texas, the Big Man’s Reef project placed thousands of concrete railroad ties and reef pyramids in an existing 160-acre reef site, creating habitat for key reef fish species including Gulf red snapper. In Louisiana, CCA’s R.E.E.F. program built five new artificial reef sites in an area where oil and gas platforms had been removed, replacing lost habitat chosen by local anglers who had long fished the platforms that once stood there. In Texas’s Redfish Bay, CCA partnered with Ducks Unlimited and Texas Parks and Wildlife to protect and enhance 5,236 acres of seagrass beds, intertidal wetlands, and coastal islands.
CCA puts its money where the fish are.
Funding the researchers who keep the data honest.
Every policy decision CCA advocates for is grounded in science. And healthy science requires the next generation of marine scientists to have every resource they need to do the work.
The Science of Conservation Scholarship Program is a partnership between industry, conservation groups, and marine science centers designed to invest in that next generation, funding the researchers who will be making the arguments and building the data sets that shape fisheries management for decades to come.
You can’t manage what you don’t understand. You can’t protect what you can’t measure.
Teaching anglers how to release fish the right way.
CCA’s ReleaSense initiative approaches conservation from a different angle: if anglers are going to release fish, they should release them in a way that gives those fish the best chance of survival.
ReleaSense provides a platform for anglers, industry, and resource managers to share catch and release best practices for prized sportfish species, instructional videos, interviews with expert anglers and fisheries managers, and expanding information resources designed to improve survival rates of released fish. Better release practices mean healthier fish populations, which means better fishing for everyone.
Turning a fishing tournament into a conservation engine.
Once a year, CCA runs one of the most unusual fishing tournaments in the country. The STAR Tournament offers over $1,000,000 in prizes and scholarships while directly supporting CCA’s conservation work. It’s a way to make the case that fishing and conservation fuel each other.
We build the boat. CCA protects what you chase with it.
The fish Contender owners chase—redfish, snook, tarpon, red snapper, sailfish, wahoo, mahi—are the same fish CCA has been fighting to protect and restore since 1977. A Contender without fishable water and healthy populations is just a fast way to look at an empty ocean.
The boat in your slip is only as valuable as the fishery it gives you access to. CCA has been protecting that fishery for nearly fifty years. Contender is proud to stand behind it.
Join 125,000 anglers already fighting for the fishery at joincca.org.
Find your local chapter and get involved. Every membership funds the conservation work that keeps the fishery healthy and your access to it intact.
The redfish came back because fourteen anglers in a tackle shop refused to accept what was happening. That same energy is still running CCA today.
