There was nothing fishy about a waterman digging for clams in a protected zone of the Chesapeake Bay because the state natural resources department failed to publish the area’s specific boundaries, Maryland’s top court has held.
Some areas in the Chesapeake Bay are off-limits to clamming in order to protect the ecosystem, but a waterman argued that the Department of Natural Resources failed to communicate exactly where these areas were. The Court of Appeals said that while the Department of Natural Resources published notice of the Chesapeake Bay’s protected zones in The Baltimore Sun and the Waterman’s Gazette, it failed to include a map, detailed chart or exact coordinates of off-limits fishing areas and therefore could not prosecute a fisherman found clamming in one of the zones.
The decision last week reversed a lower court that had found Edward Bruce Lowery Jr. guilty of digging clams in a protected area.
State fisheries laws ban clam harvesting in certain areas to protect aquatic vegetation and maintain the bay’s ecosystem. These are called “submerged aquatic vegetation,” or SAV, zones. State law requires DNR to “publish by public notice, delineations of SAV protection zones and revisions to SAV protection zones.” Lowery claimed the protected boundaries were not properly advertised with specific maps of banned areas, but the state contended it had published a notice of the zones in two publications and was not required by law to provide more specific charts and latitudes.
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