When Virginia closed its winter dredge fishery in 2008, waterman Clay Justis turned his attention from catching crabs that season to collecting the gear that captures them.
He was one of several watermen hired under a program that taught them to use sonar to find and remove lost and abandoned fishing gear, primarily crab pots, littering the bottom of the Bay.
“As a waterman, I knew there was stuff on the bottom, but when I turned the machine on, I was like, ‘Wow!’” said Justis, who fishes out of Accomack on the Eastern Shore.
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Call the governors office and ask for more clean-up funding. More crabs are good for the bay. Seems like a simple solution.
ReplyDeleteTake it from DNR officers off-season drinking money. Kill 2 birds with one stone!
This would be a worthwhile program for Maryland. I would not mind tax money going towards this.
ReplyDeletemore taxes to clean up a bay that is dead and being killed by other states that have care what so ever.
ReplyDeletealmost need to put a gps tracker on each pot so that the crabber can find his/her pot and be able to pick them up at the end of each season. Would be interesting to see if that tech were available
ReplyDeleteTotal a great idea. As a Waterman I would love to see GPS required on every pot. So we have a $40 pot with $5 more worth of state required "cull rings" a $5 cork and the labor to print my state assigned license number to it and now a $100 GPS unit on every pot. Multiply that by the 900 pots I need to set just to keep a roof over my head. Subtract all the pots that get run over and cut off or get stolen and you get an $1000 bushel of jimmies. You will kill the industry and then EVERY crab will be coming from Singapore, where they don't care about lost pots, or how much mercury is in the water.
DeleteThe vast majority of crabs on the bottom are small enough to swim in and out of pots right through the wire. The crabs caught for consumption are as big as they get. That is why the idea of "over fishing" blue crabs is outrageous. It's like saying bug zappers will cause mosquitos to go extinct.
Once one or two crabs die in an abandoned pot, you really don't get many more coming in. They tend to steer clear. Peeler crabs will hardly ever go into a pot with a dead crab.
I'm curious to know what kind of sonar they are using, is it a side scan sonar? It seems to me it would have to be.
ReplyDelete2:39. The bay is not dead. In fact it's in better shape than it's been in decades. Thanks to efforts by Maryland and other states.
ReplyDeletethe bay is one big bacteria laden cesspool dead zone. so stop the bs lying! go in it with a cut then let me know how great it is!
ReplyDeleteFOOLS!