Crackdown puts pinch on illegal crabbers

VIRGINIA BEACH

State marine police completed a massive enforcement sweep Thursday against illegal crabbing in coastal waters and the Chesapeake Bay, a campaign described as the first of its kind in Virginia, aimed at protecting slumping crab stocks during the summer harvest season.

The crackdown, from the Potomac River to the North Carolina line and along the Eastern Shore, involved almost the entire marine police force of 70 men and women, and was kept secret until launched Wednesday morning.

"It was all hands on deck," said John Bull, a spokesman for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, the agency that regulates commercial fishing and also oversees the marine police. "Unless you were on vacation or had a search-and-rescue on your hands, you were part of this."

By its end late Thursday, the sweep had resulted in hundreds of confiscated crab pots, dozens of tickets, more than 2,000 inspections - and some more bad blood among watermen, many of whom feel Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's administration has gone overboard in trying to cut harvests of female crabs 34 percent this year.

After receiving a court summons Thursday morning in Broad Bay in Virginia Beach, local crabber Brian Ewell did not mince words about the crackdown.

"Y'all have put enough regulations on us without all this crap!" Ewell snapped at two marine officers, Steve Bennis and Javier Arce, who had cited him for not having the right kind of escape holes, or cull rings, in his pots.

"Just give me the damned ticket and get out of here," Ewell added. "I've got work to do."

Bennis and Arce were not finished, however.

They also ticketed an agent working with Ewell, Mark Zirkel, for using pots also lacking the correct cull rings.

Both men face a court hearing next month in Virginia Beach and, if caught again, the possibility of losing their licenses.

Afterward, Bennis was philosophical about the encounter.

"Most guys out here are hard-working people trying to make a living and doing the right thing," he said. "Others would catch the last crab in the Chesapeake Bay and then blame us for it."

Of the more than 75 tickets handed out Wednesday and Thursday, the vast majority were related to new rules governing cull rings, officials said.

The rings, about the size of a baseball, are cut into the sides of square crab pots and designed to give smaller crabs a chance to escape back into the wild.

As of July 1, watermen are supposed to have installed four rings in each of their pots, of three different diameters, and all of them in the top chamber of their two-chambered pot. Failure to comply is a Class 3 misdemeanor.

The change meant that watermen had to alter all of their pots, which could take a lot of time and energy, considering that most crabbers use 150 to 500 such traps.

The crackdown stemmed, in part, from reports heard by marine police that many watermen were planning to ignore the new ring rules and hope no one caught them. They had good reason to think they could get away with it.

Virginia employs only 70 officers to patrol more than 5,000 miles of shoreline, conduct boating safety inspections, assist the Coast Guard with homeland-security assignments and enforce fishing rules.

"We're short-handed, out manned and out numbered," said Bennis, one of four patrol officers in a district that runs from the North Carolina line to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, west to the Elizabeth River in Norfolk and south to the Intracoastal Waterway in Chesapeake.

As part of the crackdown this week, Bennis and Arce focused on the Lynnhaven River. They inspected more than 50 pots in all branches of the river and found six violations, all related to cull rings. They confiscated four of the pots, whose owners will later be ticketed or called.

They issued two tickets, to Ewell and Zirkel, and found four other watermen in full compliance.

One was Joe Palmer, a retired Virginia Beach police officer who now sports a sun-bleached blond ponytail and an easy smile.

His pots were all equipped with five of the widest cull rings. On Thursday, he harvested eight bushels of crabs from the Western Branch of the Lynnhaven - "a pretty decent morning," he said.

Asked about state enforcement of crabbing rules, Palmer smiled wryly. "I think it's just right," he said.

Asked about new regulations aimed at protecting crab stocks, Palmer got more serious.

"The governor did not do anybody any favors by saying he wanted to cut harvests 34 percent," Palmer said. "A lot of what was passed is well-meaning, but it's causing a lot of pain. And I'm not sure it's going to do an awful lot."

To reduce harvests and hopefully spark a population recovery, Virginia this spring adopted several new regulations, and may pursue others next year.

It is shortening the crabbing season by one month, extending by a month a no-harvest zone in the middle of the Bay, requiring more cull rings, and hopes to end the controversial practice of winter dredging, in which female crabs are scraped from the bottom of the Bay during hibernation.

Since watermen can catch crabs only until 1 p.m., Bennis and Arce were finished by then, and returned to the docks at Long Bay Point Marina after a long morning on the water.

"We did some good work," said Bennis, a former Norfolk police officer and detective. "I'm sure the word will get around that we're capable of mustering this kind of effort, and people will comply."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com