Maryland's watermen reported landing slightly more Chesapeake Bay blue crabs last month than in July last year, but this season's total harvest continues to run behind the record lows of last year.
According to preliminary figures released yesterday by the state Department of Natural Resources, watermen took nearly 3.6 million pounds of soft and hard crabs from the bay last month, up from 3.4 million in the same month last year.
The figures are based on reports filed by about 75 percent of the state's commercial crabbers, said DNR spokesman John Surrick.
The July harvest, which accounts for less than 20 percent of the eight-month season's total, averages about 6 million pounds and has ranged between 7 million and 9 million pounds in the 1990s.
The harvest this year is 8.4 million pounds, far less than the 12.3 million pounds reported caught by this time last year.
The figures, which weigh heavily in the battle between state officials and watermen over new crabbing regulations, are not surprising, Surrick said. "We did not expect to have a particularly good year," he said.
A group of lower Eastern Shore watermen and seafood processors have gone to court in an effort to overturn the regulations, which shorten crabbers' hours on the water, arguing that the rules will ruin them financially.
Retired Judge J. Owen Wise turned down their pleas to suspend the rules, which took effect July 23, until their case can come to trial. In an opinion issued Aug. 3, Wise said granting the group's wishes risked "the imminent loss of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab as a fishery."
The group has asked for a three-judge panel to review the ruling, but no hearing has been scheduled. The suit to overturn the regulations is scheduled to go to trial in Worcester County Circuit Court Oct. 17.
Faced with declining crab harvests and scientific surveys indicating that the population could be on the verge of a crash, Maryland and Virginia agreed in December to reduce commercial crab harvests by 15 percent over the next three years in an effort to double the spawning stock.
Virginia closed its peeler pot and hard crab fisheries a second day a week from June through August, reduced the catch limit in the winter dredge fishery from 20 to 17 barrels a day and limited recreational crabbers to a bushel a day of hard crabs and two bushels of soft crabs, or peelers.
Maryland shortened the watermen's workday from 14 to eight hours a day and limited them to six days a week on the water.
