ROCK HALL — ROCK HALL -- With just a few days to go before crabbing season begins, Don Pierce is spending nearly every waking hour getting ready. About 1,000 yellow crab pots are stacked in the yard. A crew of three men is helping him strip rotted plywood off his workboat, the Bri-Steff, to prepare for eight months of work on the Chesapeake Bay.
But for watermen like Pierce, the anticipation is coupled with a sense of dread. The bay's blue crab population has plummeted. Maryland and Virginia are planning to impose new restrictions on crabbing, but no one is certain when they will be issued or how tough they will be. That worries environmentalists, who want to protect one of the Chesapeake's signature species, and watermen, who face added uncertainty in what has always been an unpredictable living.
"The worst part about it is that I have to order my gear now for the fall, and I don't know what they're going to do. They're really dragging their feet," Pierce said of the regulators. "I don't have a field to back me up, or a law office behind me. One hundred percent of my income comes from the Chesapeake Bay."
Natural resources officials in the two states are promising to act soon, but say they need time to consider public input.
Maryland - where the season officially opens April 1 - might ban the keeping of female crabs larger than 6.5 inches to protect the most fertile. The state is also considering bushel limits for both crab-potters and those who use trotlines. And it may close the soft-shell crab season for a couple of weeks and limit the catch of recreational crabbers.
In Virginia, where the season began this month, regulators have changed their soft-shell crab rules to match Maryland's tougher standards on size. This week, they voted to extend by a month the time that a 928-square-mile sanctuary in the bay is off-limits to crabbers.
Virginia regulators will be voting on more significant measures in late April. Proposals include limiting or even ending that state's winter dredge fishery, a decades-old practice in which watermen catch female crabs as they burrow in the mud. The practice has long been banned in Maryland.
The Maryland Department of Natural Resources warned watermen in September that the crab population is in trouble. Department officials say they intended to have drafted regulations by now, but are still sifting through public response to the options.
