It was a long time coming, but the state Fish and Wildlife Commission finally bowed to overwhelming numbers of recreational crab fishermen and voted 7-2 late last week to make a sea change in Puget Sound Dungeness crab management.
The citizen commission, which sets policy for the state Fish and Wildlife Department, adopted the most recreation-friendly option of the three available, which came as a mild surprise to some observers of the state’s long-running “crab wars.”
Assuming new regulations are written and approved this winter, the policy change will give recreational fishers a larger share of the harvestable Puget Sound crab next year, at the expense of non-tribal commercial crabbers. The state Auditor’s Office, in a report issued earlier this year, found that Washington’s current policy for allocating the harvest would not be able to accommodate the continued growth in the number of Puget Sound sport crabbers.
About 220,000 license endorsements to fish for crab in Puget Sound were sold to recreationists this year, said Rich Childers, state shellfish manager, while five years ago the number was 160,000.
The new policy eliminates the current quota system of harvest allocation between user groups, switching instead to a fixed season for recreationists in the Sound. Regulations will allow sport crabbers five days of fishing time per week, including weekends, from July through Labor Day, with a five-crab daily limit. The new policy also establishes a winter season running seven days a week from October through December.
Current regulations limit recreationists to four days per week, including Saturdays but not Sundays. That missing weekend day was a major irritant under the quota system, as was the lack of an established, full-time winter season. The only winter opportunity for local sport crabbers in a lot of years has been a few days around Thanksgiving if there happened to be a bit of quota left, said Steve Burton, Region 4 crab manager at the Mill Creek WDFW office.
So how important is this change for local recreational crabbers?
“It’s huge,” said Tom Nelson, Lake Stevens resident and host of The Outdoor Line, Saturday mornings on ESPN Radio, 710 Seattle. “Not only do we get more crab by the numbers, but we get full summer weekends and, finally, a winter season which will give blackmouth fishermen an option.”
Perhaps even more important, Nelson said, is that the commission finally faced the fact that under current economic conditions, the state can no longer ignore the impact of recreational fisheries — millions of dollars in recreational crabbing value versus thousands of dollars in commercial value — according to most studies.
“It sort of forces more equality in the establishment of fishing regulations,” Nelson said. “That’s OK. I don’t care how we get there, as long as we get there.”
How many more crab will recreationists get under the new regulations? That’s unclear because of a number of factors involved and a complicated quota-setting formula. Childers, in Olympia, said commercial fishers could see their share drop from approximately 67 percent of the non-tribal half to 55 percent under the new policy.
In local Marine Areas 8-1 and 8-2 (Possession Point north to Deception Pass), however, the numbers are a little different.
“Areas 8-1 and 8-2 are among the most heavily used by recreationists anywhere in the Sound,” Burton said, “and realistically the split here has been closer to 45 percent sport/55 percent commercial in good years recently. Under the new policy, that will likely reverse itself.”
Obviously, the switch to a season approach instead of a quota does not give recreationists a free hand. The state must still meet federal mandates for the tribal half of the resource and, since there is no system to make in-season recreational harvest adjustments, an over-catch by sport crabbers could result in a shorter season the following year. Payback to the tribes and non-tribal commercials is a possibility, Burton said, but “we have a pretty good handle on the numbers and I really don’t see a payback situation developing in 8-1 or 8-2.”
There’s one other small fly in the ointment, Burton said, involving the new winter season.
“Winter crabbing is very popular with a minority of recreationists,” he said. “It’s usually not as crowded and the crab are in good condition. But the new approach tends to bring back the old ‘in common’ situation, where gear from all three user groups are in the water at the same time. On some of those nice, cold, clear, sunny December days it could get pretty crowded out there. We just don’t know, because we haven’t done that for a long time.”
The commission stressed the importance of vigilant enforcement strategies, public information and annual reporting by the state to meet its statutory obligation to conduct “orderly fisheries.”
To fund those efforts, the state will seek to raise fees on recreational license endorsements for Puget Sound crabbing to $7.50 annually from the current $3.
The commission is scheduled to hold public hearings on the new regulations in December and consider final adoption in February.
For more fishing and hunting news, check out Wayne Kruse’s blog at www.heraldnet.com/huntingandfishing.
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