We were checked at Everett crabbing a week or so ago..The officer was nice and climbed in the boat ...not easy since it was on the trailer and I use a ladder to get in..he looked at all of our 18 crab and measured several. We were all totally legal and polite to him....I appreciated him doing his job as I suspect alot of abuse of the crab rules goes on out there.

I got nailed once years ago at Sekiu for a barbed hook....I had a PIPS container with about 12 leaders all barbless and also about 10 barbless leaders in whole herring on ice ready to deploy. There was an unused rod on board the boat with a barbed hook..a new leader that hadn't been pinched and I got a ticket for that..not within the law but he originally stopped us for not punching a card fast enough....all our fish were over 30# and took 30 minutes or so to bring to the boat. We just netted one and sat on the cooler for less than 30 seconds waiting for the knees to stop knocking together before he appeared out of nowhere...We had 3 fish (all legal then) and had all of them punched ...except the one we just set in the boat...We don't cheat so it was pretty frustrating but I took his ticket and smiled...You shouldn't get a ticket for a hook not even in use but I suspect if I had corrected the officer he would have made my life miserable....Sometimes it seems like they want you to punch your card before bringing the fish on board..I thought it was ok to punch before you started fishing again. When the big King bite was on at Sekiu you didn't have a lot of time to mess around but we always punched the cards....just not in 30 seconds or less.