Updated Sep 5, 2009 - 1:56 pm

Crab fisherman lose fight to lift catch limits

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The fishermen had sought an emergency restraining order requiring the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to remove the catch limit.

Thurston County Superior Court Judge Anne Hirsch denied the request Friday saying they failed to show the restriction was "arbitrary and capricious."

The Olympian reports the state had imposed a weekly limit of 2,500 pounds on the industry on Aug. 28 to protect Dungeness crabs. That limit was raised to 4,500 pounds on Sept. 1. The crab season ends Sept. 15.

The fishermen, most based in Westport, argued the state used faulty information to set the limit.

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• Sportfisher wrote...

  Why are commercial fishermen so greedy?

  Its too bad these people believe the STATE owes them a living beyond what nature can accommodate. The crab fleet in Alaska has been reduced to reduce over harvest. There are approximately 14,000 derelict crab traps in Puget Sound. They keep fishing year around, as do the surveyed 4000 gillnets. And you knuckleheads wonder what happened to your harvest. The ground fish are nearly gone and the taxpayers of this state spend tens of millions of dollars to raise salmon for commercial fishermen, who already harvest most of the wild fish in this state. Wild fish dont cost the tax payers a dime. Im fed up with people who think we owe them a living.

  September 5, 2009 5:02 pm

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• Bcleve wrote...

  Moratorium anyone??

  When the ding-dang doodah is the state gonna wise up and declare a wholesale moratorium on inland fishing and wild stock? At least a minimum of a year might seriously help the localized commercial guys who are consistently marginalized each time they step in a boat. This does includes tribes, who should know better but deny this anyway.This moratorium, if taken as a real item, is at least twenty years too late, so any current discussion now is extraneous......

  September 5, 2009 5:14 pm

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• bofus wrote...

  The catch limit was..

  set because of soft shelled crab. This time of year crabs are beginning their molt cycle and are soft shelled. Handling of soft crab can cause mortalities. Soft crab also are not "filled out" and have poor meat quality as well as quantity, i.e recovery rate. The state establishes trip quotas this time of year if sampling shows a certain percentage of soft shells in the catch. The trip limits act to limit the amount of soft shelled crab that must be sorted out in order to get the hardshell crabs that the processors want.

  September 5, 2009 7:54 pm

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• Nickatnyt wrote...

  Fed up with fisherman.

  You guys are selfish, stupid, and downright bad for the environment. I hope the state does impose a ZERO catch moratorium for a minimum of two years. It might be the best thing that could happen to SAVE your lame occupation!

  September 5, 2009 9:59 pm

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• bofus wrote...

  Commercial crabs

  Those who would suggest that fishing for dungeness crabs should be curtailed for a number of years have no clue to the dynamics of the fishery. This is one of the best managed fisheries there is. It is regulated by the size limit of the male crabs and the prohibition on landing female crabs. The size limit and female prohibition assure that the population is able to reproduce itself. The problem here is that the summer fishery kills soft shell crabs when they are intermixed with the limited number of hardshell crabs. These softshelled crabs would be good hardshell crabs in the winter fishery. There are a limited amount of boats that fish this time of year but they think that it is ok to sort through 20+ softshells in order to retain one keeper hardshell crab. They ignore the mortality they are causing (some studies suggest 60%) to the softshell crabs they throw back because they are making a few bucks. The majority of the dungeness crab fleet does not approve of this. The solution to this would be to close the same time as Oregon does, August 15 but as in many natural resource issues politics overrides the science.

  September 5, 2009 10:30 pm

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• Bcleve wrote...

  The underside does hurt...

  I agree wholesale w/ Bofus that there is sometimes no distinction made between hardshell and softshell crab keepers among commercial, tribal, and rec crabbers. Again I reiterate that a moratorium of sorts is the inevitable solution, altho a shortented season, Like Oregons, can't be that painful, politically or otherwise. You'd think the brains in Olympia, esp W&F, might recoginze this, but where do you think this "soft-shelled" thinking starts, anyway?......

  September 6, 2009 11:10 am

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