Watermen

Fisheries regulators who oversee Maryland's annual striped bass quota should delay any punishment until the conclusion of a state and federal undercover sting operation that broke up a major commercial black market, state natural resources officials said. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission begins its winter meeting today in Alexandria, Va., and the first item on the agenda is a discussion of the status of striped bass along the Eastern Seaboard. Traditionally, commission members have been quick to punish Maryland for infractions, most recently slashing the recreational allocation to compensate for overfishing.

Last year, the threat facing Maryland's diamondback terrapin was as plain as the little noses on their faces. Demand for them as food or pets had skyrocketed. And a leading terrapin researcher presented compelling evidence that their harvest has been greatly underreported. Considering that Virginia prohibits the harvest of diamondbacks, it looked like a pretty easy call for state lawmakers and the Department of Natural Resources to follow suit. But what happened next made matters worse.

A group of watermen who say the state is not doing enough to sustain the Chesapeake Bay's troubled oyster industry are launching a new advocacy group. In July, Jimmy Kline, a Cecil County waterman, filed paperwork with the state to form the Maryland Oystermen Association, a nonprofit based in Rock Hall. Once the application process is complete, Kline said he expects about 100 watermen to join. The group's main goal, Kline said, will be to persuade state officials to move large amounts of natural oyster seed and shell around the bay - which the Maryland Department of Natural Resources did for decades but has cut back on recently - in order to give watermen a crop to harvest.

OFF TOLCHESTER BEACH -- The skies were a worrisome gray, and the wind was strong enough to knock over even the most seasoned seaman. Fishermen who had mulled a day on the water seemed to have quickly scrapped their plans - for miles, the Chesapeake Bay seemed almost deserted. But then the Patricia Campbell plowed through the whitecaps. The crew aboard the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's 60-foot research vessel hoisted a crane, loaded several concrete balls filled with holes and dropped them into the water.

SOLOMONS -- Tommy Zinn peers into the glistening Patuxent River, watching his line of chicken necks go by. A crab bites one and Zinn quickly scoops it up in his dip net, dropping it onto a cull bin where about a dozen other blue and red clawed crabs skitter about. It's not great, not by a long shot. But with Memorial Day being just about the biggest weekend for selling and eating crabs, Zinn tries anyway. A days' work gets him just one basket of crabs, which he'll sell for about $100. Minus his fuel and bait costs, Zinn will net about $70. While thousands of families are sitting down with a few cold longnecks and a plate of steamers on a holiday weekend, Maryland's crabbers are feeling pinched.

COULD a person from Wisconsin, where the state motto is "Eat Cheese or Die," go a year without chowing down on Cheddar? Could a Texan go without steak? Could someone from Pennsylvania Dutch country say no to shoofly pie? Could a San Franciscan lay off the Rice-A-Roni for 12 months?Could a Marylander abstain from crabs for a year?Tough one.Eating steamed crabs from the Chesapeake is a time-honored tradition in Maryland. As I write this, I crave them. Unless you're a total veg-head, eating crab meat in any form -- crab cake, crab dip, crab imperial, crab soup, or the wacky crab cake fluff -- is something you do in these parts.

THE LATEST studies indicate the Chesapeake's blue crab population is in clear decline. Unfortunately, we've heard the same woeful assessments for years.Maryland imposed new limits on crabbing three years ago, cutting permitted fishing times and catches. The results were mixed: a spurt in the crab catch one season, a drop the next.Logically, the emphasis on curbing overfishing should have yielded an increase in crab numbers, given their short life span of two to four years. But commercial watermen have increased their efforts, within the rules, to take more of the shellfish.

His "Live Crabs" sign no longer hangs at the end of the road. A wooden fence encloses his crab box and gear. And sales have fallen so low that Benjamin Dennis is finding it more and more difficult to be a waterman in Anne Arundel County.The downturn began early last year, Dennis said, when the county notified him that he could no longer sell crabs or store gear outside his Shady Side home. He was told that a neighbor had complained that the stack of crab pots in his yard was a blight in the community.

To the list of species that don't belong in Chesapeake Bay and probably will harm its delicate balance, add the veined rapa whelk, a snail with an appetite for shellfish that has been feasting on clams and oysters near Hampton Roads, Va.Watermen working around the mouths of the James and York rivers say they've seen these creatures that vaguely resemble the native conch for several years, but only recently did they know what they were and how much damage...

Maryland's commercial watermen hauled in 33.7 million pounds of blue crabs between April and November, according to preliminary reports from the Maryland's Department of Natural Resources.The catch was an improvement over the 26.2 million pounds caught during the 1998 season, the worst in nearly two decades. The harvest remained below the 38 million pound average of the past eight years.The figures are about what DNR biologists expected after their winter dredge survey in January, said Eric Schwaab, head of the fisheries division.

Just a week after the successful conclusion of a statewide fishing contest and a two-year hair-tearing but ultimately rewarding review of management policies, it seemed as if the fisheries community was finally getting its act together. But Monday night's hearing on proposed regulations for commercial striped bass fishing was a dilly of a performance that was more "Scary Movie" than the second coming of Hitchcock. Where to begin? Take the opening scene, in which a state fisheries official explained that allowing Chesapeake Bay watermen to increase the length of the gill nets they carry on board from 2,400 yards to 3,500 yards was to "help harvesters increase efficiency and improve the ability to catch their daily landing limit in a shorter period."

In less than 20 feet of water, just north of where tankers and cruise ships make their slow turns from the Chesapeake Bay into the Patapsco River, lies the third rail of Maryland fishing. An oyster bar made up of millions of bushels of fossil shell sits on the bay bottom - the largest single deposit left in Maryland's portion of the bay. The state wants to restart its languishing oyster restoration program by digging up as much as 30 percent of the bar - known as Man-O-War Shoal - to serve as a foundation for a $30 million program.

GREENBELT - A Virginia waterman was sentenced in U.S. District Court on Wednesday to one year and one day in prison, was fined $4,000 and was ordered to make $40,000 in restitution for his part in the largest striped bass poaching case in the history of the Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, the sting operation widened as federal prosecutors charged a St. Mary's County waterman and fish wholesaler and his business with falsifying catch records and illegally selling...

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.

Sitting in a federal courtroom Thursday, listening to prosecutors outline the cases against five watermen who pleaded guilty to poaching striped bass to supply a black market, was like reviewing an indictment of slipshod work by Department of Natural Resources officials. Some examples: * Commercial check-in stations were allowed to be run by people who had records of fishing and crabbing violations. * Watermen weren't required at the end of the season to turn in surplus tags used to mark their catches, which prevented anyone from checking tags against catch reports.

GREENBELT -One by one, five watermen admitted yesterday in federal court that they poached more than $2.1 million worth of striped bass from the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River as part of a black market. With wives and relatives watching, the men - four from Maryland and one from Virginia - pleaded guilty to falsifying catch records to exceed their annual quotas and selling illegal fish to dealers who supplied them to shops and restaurants across the country. Individually, they also admitted to crimes ranging from fishing out of season to conspiring with wholesalers to lie about the species they caught to cover up their activity.

It has been a good news, bad news kind of week. But these days, if you can get a 50-50 mix, consider yourself ahead. Good news: Yellow perch are beginning to make guest appearances in Chesapeake Bay tributaries, a sure sign we're on the back side of winter (fingers crossed). Up in North East, Capt. Mike Benjamin is already offering half-day yellow perch charter trips on the Susquehanna River. When it comes to spring, I'll take yellow perch arriving over a groundhog seeing its shadow any day of the week.

Maryland's new crabbing restrictions succeeded in reducing the catch of female crabs significantly last year, state officials said yesterday, despite reports from watermen that their harvest increased by 50 percent. State fisheries officials said that based on independent surveys, they estimate the female crab harvest in Maryland declined by 28 percent to 36 percent. Prompted by surveys indicating that the Chesapeake Bay's crab population was dangerously low, Maryland and Virginia both pledged last year to reduce the female crab catch by 34 percent.

Virginia watermen used illegally submerged nets to fish out of season and altered and reused fish tags as part of the black market responsible for illegally catching millions of dollars worth of striped bass from the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River, according to affidavits for federal search warrants. The court records, filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., present a picture of a much larger operation, one in which one waterman boasted to undercover officers of making $600,000 in one year of poaching and hinted at making bribes.

Maryland has had to stomach some unusually bad seafood-related behavior lately. Two incidents raise questions about how well the state is protecting some of its most prized Chesapeake Bay natural resources. First, it appears last year's crab harvest has not been reported honestly by watermen. And, in the even more troubling event, federal investigators have uncovered a large-scale poaching ring that has been plundering the bay's striped bass population for years. The problem with the crab harvest is a real curiosity.