States Come Together to Help Restore the Crab Stocks of Yore

To hear the early prognostications of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, we shouldn't even have bothered to bait our crab lines this spring. But we did, and the results have been unexpectedly pleasing.

The best information on crabbing these days comes not from official sources, it turns out, but from the crabbers' message board on the Web site http://www.Tidalfish.com, where recreational dip-netters and chicken-neckers from Norfolk to Havre de Grace weigh in daily with surprisingly detailed reports. They, too, have been recording decent results lately, sometimes filling their bushel baskets by 8 a.m.

With July 4, when demand soars, safely in the rear-view mirror, it's beginning to look like an acceptable crab year, which is good news in every respect except if it blunts recent efforts by Maryland and Virginia to bring the commercial crabbing industry to heel in the face of the latest worrisome scientific data.

Last winter's dredge surveys of Chesapeake crab stocks showed the lowest numbers ever -- a 70 percent decline since the early 1990s. Meantime, Maryland resource managers estimated 60 percent of the bay's catchable crabs got caught last year, about 90 percent of them by commercial crabbers. Biologists say anything above a 46 percent catch rate puts the resource in grave reproductive peril.

In the face of these numbers, the two states got together this spring to impose restrictions on crabbing aimed at reversing the decline. While the steps don't go as far as some would like, they represent a positive new direction in resource management on the bay.

"We are happy that at least Maryland and Virginia have agreed to cooperate to restore crabs," said Sherman Baynard, fisheries chief for the independent Coastal Conservation Association of Maryland. "In the past, Virginia has been more resistant. This time they're the leaders."

When foot-dragging Virginia leads the way on a crucial Chesapeake marine resource issue, it's cause for celebration. Officials in the Old Dominion finally took aim at a longstanding problem -- overharvest of pregnant female crabs that head south in the fall to bury in the mud near the mouth of the bay and release their fry by the millions in spring.

Under the new restrictions, Virginia crabbers this year may keep no female crabs after Oct. 27, more than a month earlier than closures in the past. Also, the so-called winter dredge fishery, in which ripe females were dug from the bottom and trucked off for sale, was shut for the first time in a century, putting about 60 operators out of work.

Maryland will close its fall crab fishery for females on Oct. 23 and put stricter limits on commercial catch of female crabs before then. It also barred recreational crabbers from keeping any females all season.

The aim is to reduce the overall catch of mature female crabs by about one-third, baywide. Eric Schwaab, Maryland's deputy secretary of natural resources, said the measures should result in 20 million to 26 million more pregnant female crabs surviving the winter to spawn in spring near the mouth of the bay. "We have great confidence that's going to yield concrete results," he said.

Let's hope so. Maryland has been toying with crab conservation for the last seven years, after catch totals plunged in 2000 and 2001. Schwaab conceded that the modest strictures of the past few years barely held the line, maintaining crab populations at historically low levels without steepening the decline. The new measures, he said, should do more.

Here in Annapolis, where the crab remains king, we've lowered our own expectations by about half. A decade ago, a good crabbing day meant leaving the dock at 5:30 a.m. and filling up a bushel with fat males by 8 or 8:30. The crab feast organized for that night often included neighbors and friends, and as often as not there were one or two dozen crabs left over to pick out for crabcakes.

These days we're happy to return by 9 with half a bushel (about three dozen crabs), which is enough for lunch for the immediate family and perhaps a guest or two.

The trotline we use is 600 feet, with about 150 chicken-neck baits strung along its length. A good run in the 1990s yielded a dozen keepers. These days five or six keepers on a run puts a smile on our faces.

In resource-management parlance, our "catch per unit of effort" (CPU) is declining, which is always a worry. Like the commercial crabbers who do it for a living, we're looking to technology to help bridge the gap. This year we have a bigger boat and bigger motor to expand our range, and installed an electronic depth-finder to zoom in on the winding channel edges where the big boys dwell.

Down this slippery slope we travel, putting more pressure on the resource as it grows scarcer, until someone either steps in to stop the carnage or the resource disappears altogether, the way oysters essentially have.

Which will it be this time? Time will tell. Meantime, there are some crabs out there, and they steam up just as nicely as ever.

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Never been chicken-necking? It's worth a try, especially with kids. All you need is a ball of twine, a long-handled net, some one-ounce fishing sinkers and a bag of skinless chicken parts, preferably necks if you can find them.

Dangle a dozen or so weighted baits on the bottom alongside dock pilings or seawalls and wander back and forth, checking to see if anything has picked one up. If the bait starts walking away, raise it slowly and dip the crab off with the net.

Some decent crabbing destinations near Washington include the docks at Sandy Point State Park near Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the public dock on the West River at Galesville, the pier beneath the Route 4 bridge in Solomons, docks on the Patuxent River at Benedict and at Point Lookout State Park at the mouth of the Potomac.