How we love the Chesapeake blue crab: love it steamed, stewed and Norfolked; love it hard and soft, and even "buckramy," a stage between soft and hard, when it is particularly sweet.
And how we love to catch the crab:
With pots, scrapes, dredges, rings, traps, dip nets, trotlines and chicken necks, to name but a few methods.
Catch it swimming on the surface, hiding in the sea grass, finning through the black depths of the shipping channels and buried in the mud.
Catch it as it migrates, as it spawns, as it mates and while it hibernates; in every season and every one of the approximately 3 million acres of the bay and its tidal tributaries.
Just as pursuit of the oyster, shad, rockfish and diamondback terrapin once set the bay milieu, so, almost alone, does the crab today.
Not surprisingly, there are signs that these beautiful swimmers, while still abundant, are being overfished.
The average daily catch per commercial crabber in Maryland has declined for six years now, even though the crabbing effort -- both recreational and commercial -- is up substantially.
The challenge has been well-described by Eugene Cronin, retired director of bay research for Maryland, and one who
studied crabs with equal zest in institutes of higher learning and Smith Island crab skiffs: "The crab is our last great fishery. . . . It spends its entire life in the bay; it ranges the entire bay; it is of exceptional value, and every aspect of harvesting it is susceptible to our management."
If we fall short of good management for this species, it is difficult to imagine real success for any species in the bay.
So far, watching Maryland and Virginia try to protect the crab has been both encouraging and exasperating -- more the latter than the former.
The proposed measures
More than four years after the states agreed to produce management plans, Maryland natural resources officials have finally settled on proposed crab conservation measures.
In concept they are laudable. They aim to take modest steps BEFORE the blue crab gets into real trouble, requiring the drastic actions we had to take with shad and rockfish.
TH The new regulations being finalized now also eliminate -- rightly, I
think -- thousands of "noncommercial" crab licenses, whose holders could essentially catch crabs in their spare time in commercial quantities.
