ROCK HALL -After sitting idle since fall, the crab pots need a tuneup - a little tightening and some cleaning. Brian Pierce is eager to get ready, even though he's not sure what kind of living he'll be able to make on the Chesapeake Bay this season.
"Hopefully, this year's going to be better," the 32-year-old waterman says as he and his helper, Michael Orr, work their way through towering stacks of the wire-mesh crab traps.
The crab season's traditional April 1 start couldn't come soon enough for watermen like Pierce and Orr, who've endured a long, lean winter. But the season begins on a note of uncertainty, as fishers and biologists await news from a winterlong dredge survey of the bay's crab population to see whether it has rebounded from a perilously low level last year.
In October, state officials moved up the ban on catching female crabs by seven weeks in an effort to protect the stock. But the early cutoff cost full-time crabbers like Pierce dearly - thousands of dollars they usually make by harvesting female crabs as they migrate down the bay in the fall.
The results of the survey won't be known for another couple of weeks, but state officials already have set harvest regulations for this year. They say they will tweak the rules according to what the survey shows - clamping down still more if the crab population remains in dire trouble.
Some scientists, however, worry that the state has not restricted the harvest enough or in the right ways - and that it might be risking the crabs' recovery by adjusting the catch limits this year to spread the impact more evenly across all of the bay's watermen.
"We don't know if it was enough of a conservation move, and if it will be sustained," said Thomas Miller, a fisheries ecologist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Even if the survey finds more crabs in the bay, Miller said, he's concerned that the growth could be undercut by changes the Department of Natural Resources has made this year to let watermen catch females later in the fall.
Maryland and Virginia agreed last year to take steps to reduce the harvest of female crabs by 34 percent, so that more of them could survive long enough to spawn in the spring. Each state adopted its own harvest restrictions, including late-October cutoffs for catching females.
