THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 3, 1995 TAG: 9502030618
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Watermen have been harvesting crabs this week from a special Hampton Roads sanctuary created last fall to shelter blue crabs from such pressure.
What sounds like illegal fishing was made legal Tuesday by Hampton General District Court Judge Wilford Taylor, who ruled that the state did not give sufficient public notice when it established the sanctuary in October.
That opened the door for cash-starved watermen to work in protected areas near the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel that biologists describe as a winter haven for pregnant female crabs migrating south from the upper Chesapeake Bay.
``The whole lower Bay is a major reservoir of crab reproduction, and this sanctuary is certainly part of that,'' said John McConaugha, an oceanography professor and crab researcher at Old Dominion University.
While it was difficult to assess how many females have been pulled from the sanctuary, state marine officials reported about 40 crabbing boats in the area both Wednesday and Thursday.
In response, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission has called a special meeting today in Newport News to enact emergency regulations that will again close the sanctuary, said commission spokesman Wilford Kale.
The regulations would be good for 30 days, giving the commission enough time to publish them and formally adopt them as law.
Kale said it was ``an absolute oversight'' that the commission failed to publish proposed crab-protection regulations within 15 days of when they originally were adopted on Oct. 25.
State law requires that new regulations be publicly posted and open for inspection and public hearing before a government body can consider them.
Judge Taylor ruled that this simply did not occur, and he subsequently voided the regulation that established the Hampton Roads sanctuary.
His ruling came Tuesday during a case in which a Poquoson waterman, Joey Hanberry, had been caught taking crabs from the sanctuary by Virginia Marine Patrol officers, Kale said.
The case came exactly one week after the state marine commission rejected a plea from Hampton crabber Peter W. Freeman to scuttle the sanctuary and allow dredging within its waters.
Freeman, a former commission member, has argued that the sanctuary places an undue hardship on watermen who rely on money from crab-dredging to get them through the winter.
It is illegal in Virginia to dredge for crabs in rivers, creeks and inlets, except along the ocean on the Eastern Shore. While Maryland has banned dredging in its part of the Bay, Virginia continues to allow it.
According to studies by the Virginia Institute for Marine Science, crab-dredging has produced an average harvest of 7.2 million pounds of blue crabs a year since 1975.
The sanctuary debate also comes amid warning signs that the blue crab population, a treasured symbol of the Bay, is fast declining. According to VIMS, crab stocks have dropped 61 percent over the past two decades.
Installing a sanctuary in the lower Bay was one of a handful of conservation-minded actions approved by Virginia in October. Including seasonal and gear restrictions, they nonetheless were seen as a compromise to watermen and seafood interests. ILLUSTRATION: Map
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by CNB