By the time I arrived for our 7:30 a.m. appointment at his waterfront office at Crissy Field, in the San Francisco Presidio, Zeke Grader had been at work for more than two hours already. Early morning is the time he can get things done here without interruption.

The office is cozy, with a huge desk and comfortable leather chairs, the walls lined with books and photographs. It could easily be the study of a tenured university professor. And Grader is a scholar all right, with a law degree from the University of San Francisco, but he was drawn to a life of action. Having grown up around the boats and the docks in Fort Bragg, helping his parents, who shipped locally caught salmon to New York and Los Angeles to be made into lox, he had an eye for the fishing industry and a liking for the grumpy men and women who live from the ocean. He started at the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations at its founding in 1976 and has been its executive director ever since, navigating through times of major hardship and change with skill, good humor, and unflagging devotion to the 3,000 fishermen and women who work on small and medium-sized boats out of harbors in California, and some in Oregon and Washington as well.

Coast & Ocean: I’ve been wanting to talk with you for a long time, but now seems the right moment because of what happened with the crab fishermen after the Cosco Busan oil spill. Here we have a disaster just before the season opens, California fishermen agree to postpone the opening until it’s clear the crabs they catch won’t be contaminated, and then in come some big boats from Oregon, drop their traps outside the Farallones and land their catch in the dark of night. It seemed so wrong. Can you put it into context for us?

Zeke Grader: Well, I think the biggest problem we’ve had in the crab fishery over the last decade or so is that there is an adequate resource to provide for our fleet but, unfortunately, with the cutbacks in the trawler fleet--particularly after overfishing in the groundfish fishery by some of the large trawlers--a lot of them have jumped into the crab fishery and are really trying to do the same thing to crab which they did in the trawl fishery.

We succeeded in limiting the number of vessels in the fishery over a decade ago. [The California fleet numbers about 600 permitted boats.] Now we have been tackling the issue of the number of traps used per vessel. Keep in mind, trap limits are nothing new, we have them in our lobster fishery in California and they’re used in both the Maine and Florida lobster fisheries; Alaska has them and, as of a couple of years ago, Oregon and Washington have them for their crab fisheries. This is prudent in a number of ways: It provides for safer conditions for fishermen. Now, with so many traps out there, people feel compelled to try and fish every day, no matter what the weather, and they take risks. And then, so much crab hits the market at once [that the price is depressed]. If we reduce the number of traps, crab would flow into the market at a steadier pace.

So we are going to attempt to pursue trap limits again this year and we’re hoping we’ll be met with a different reaction from the governor, who has twice vetoed this legislation--and that’s totally inconsistent with his big push for protecting our oceans. We think he vetoed it because of influence from one large Oregon processor, Pacific Seafood. We’re hoping that’s going to change now.