Our Bay: This week's take: Have you hugged a waterman lately?

By BOB GALLAGHER For The Capital

Published 08/16/08

Within the last few months a series of newspaper articles have covered:

New restrictions on harvesting female crabs.

Bountiful catches of crabs by watermen.

A soft market for crabs caught by watermen.

A crackdown on crabbers bending the rules.

And efforts by the governor to obtain assistance for crabbers by declaring a disaster.

These articles suggest to this non-scientist that our fisheries policies are not working and that they are causing hardship for watermen. We won't succeed in saving crabs and other species and we will continue to pursue fisheries policies that are unfair to watermen until we...

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Hug A Waterman - August 16, 2008

The number of waterman on the bay is not the problem that needs to be addressed. In the future, with or without waterman, the bay and everything in it will surely whiter away due to the excessive pollution that has plagued the bay for more than fifty years. Answer me this question; How do you over fish something, that at one point could feed the world, yes the world, three times over? I am no expert, but that would take an enormous amount of fishermen. The Save The Bay Foundation has done anything but save the bay, and I do believe they were founded sometime in the seventies. I grew up on the bay, and used to swim in Selby, and in other various rivers on the bay. Today I would not let my dog go in that water, it is a cesspool. I can not begin to tell you the amount of raw sewage that is leached into the creeks and rivers of the bay on any given day, this and a ton of other pollution is what is killing the natural resources of the bay. Even when they try to bring some species back, as they did with the Rock Fish, they did come back, however, because of the pollution, they were all diseased. So unless some major effort is done to stop the pollution going into the bay, it will not matter whether you curtail the fishing, that would like giving a Tylenol to someone who is dying. Overfishing is not the problem, and has never been!

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