In reality the 2008 commercial crabbing season ends Monday, largely go unnoticed in this bayside town. Most watermen stopped working almost two months ago when the state outlawed the harvest of female crabs past Oct. 22. The reason of early hung up is that male crabs, plentiful in the upper areas of Chesapeake Bay, are not seen in large enough numbers in Tangier Sound to make it worth the trouble.
Jerry Lankford, who buys and sells crabs for Southern Connection Seafood in Crisfield, informed that when they couldn’t catch the females, that kind of wound it up. Crisfield waterman Billy Welch said he tried crabbing past Oct. 22 in the Choptank River area, but was barely able to cover his expenses when he caught — then tossed back — more females than males. Welch told that he decided to quit for the season the first week of November. This year, watermen saw one of the biggest crab harvests in years, and it puzzled them when state officials in May enacted emergency regulations to reduce the harvest of female crabs by 34 percent.
The number of blue crabs this summer was so abundant that wholesalers had a hard time finding buyers and watermen were unable to sell their day’s catch at the docks. The fall migration from the upper end of the bay back to Virginia starts Oct. 1. But the new regulations ended the season around the time the crabs normally make their appearance in the Crisfield area, and local watermen missed out on about half of the fall run.
Welch said recreational crabbers probably have a bigger impact on the Chesapeake Bay’s crab population than most people realize. Waterfront property owners in some parts of Maryland set crab pots off their private docks.
