People with small and large boats now agree on trap limits?

Concessions have been made. Right now people are looking at what Oregon and Washington have done, 300 traps for small boats, 500 for those who have had very large production. A larger boat will still have an advantage because they can work in much tougher weather. And really, when they get over 400 traps it’s not about how many they work per day, it’s about staking real estate. It’s just somebody trying to claim more of the crab grounds for themselves, as opposed to more equitable sharing.

Did the governor explain his veto?

The explanations were pretty lame. The cost, that it should be done through the Fish and Game Commission. But we don’t expect the Commission to take on the regulation of crab for at least ten years, they’ve got a big backlog of fisheries that they’re trying to develop fisheries management plans for that are more pressing biologically--and I don’t disagree. But we really need to deal with this particular problem right now before people are getting killed and we completely destroy our markets by trying to jam all this crab into them at once.

The fishermen want the limits?

Most supported the limits, even many of the larger vessel owners. The problem now is that there are large trawlers from the north who are trying to fish as much crab as they can around the trawl season, really not caring much about the markets. And that’s too bad because this is such a good product, it shouldn’t be treated as just a common commodity. It’s something very special and we need to be sensitive to when the prime market demand is, which is usually around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and try to provide for that.

There are two different markets. One is the fine white tablecloth market, the other is what I call the blue-collar thing, the crab feeds people put on as fundraisers for their volunteer fire departments, churches, scout troops, school libraries. Those are fun, people enjoy them. Both of those markets are pretty important, we want to maintain both. The problem is [with most of the crab being caught early in the season], much of the crab now goes to the freezer. Much of it goes to the casinos, for their buffets, particularly on the Mississippi River. That’s where this one large Oregon company that made the big campaign contribution to the governor has been selling, and that’s a waste of crab because after it sits in the freezer for a bit it has the texture and taste of Styrofoam. Of course people who have been smoking and drinking all night and hitting the casino buffet, they probably wouldn’t know the difference, so maybe we should just go with flavored Styrofoam or something for those markets and save the good crab for the white tablecloth markets and crab feeds.

So the large trawlers from Oregon were the ones that came in during the oil spill crisis here?

They [these trawlers] were the ones who were fishing when everyone else remained closed.