EWELL - The sky is dark gray, with only the slightest hint of pink in the east, when Morris Marsh pushes the Darlene, his 30-foot crab boat, away from the fuel dock and begins the winding trip through the marshes to Back Cove to begin his day's work.
For hours, he'll weave back and forth across the cove, dragging his wishbone-shaped scrapes behind him in search of crabs that are starting to shed their shells and those that are about to - busters and peelers, as watermen call them.
Marsh, 60, has been soft-crabbing all his life, but there are a growing number of crabbers aiming for the soft-crab market, which stretches from the Chesapeake Bay to New York and the Far East. He is part of a trend that worries bay scientists, who fear that such a shift in the market could confound blue-crab conservation efforts.
"They're good eatin', and a lot of people are starting to realize that," says Pat Cup, assistant manager at Annapolis Seafood Market. "And we can sell them all year long now."
Faced with a dwindling crab population in the bay, Maryland and Virginia have moved to reduce the harvest and double the numbers of females available to produce eggs, as well as of males to fertilize them.
Because peelers and soft crabs can be taken before they reach maturity, the fishery "targets crabs before they reproduce," says Rom Lipcius, a crab biologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
The smallest legally catchable size for peelers is 3 inches across, while the minimum for hard crabs is 5 inches. There are no daily catch limits on hard or soft crabs in Maryland, but there are restrictions on the amount of fishing gear watermen can use.
The Bi-State Blue Crab Advisory Committee, composed of legislators, fisheries regulators, commercial seafood interests and environmentalists from Maryland and Virginia, warned in December that the landings of peelers and soft crabs had increased over the past decade and that the "consequences remain unknown."
"It doesn't take a whole lot of smarts to figure out if you take crabs out of the water at 3 inches, they never grow up to 5 inches," says George Abbe of the Academy of Natural Sciences Estuarine Research Center at St. Leonard in Calvert County. Abbe was among the scientists who helped draft the warning.
Held in water trays
