The hunting community has had the admin penalty in place for a while. Now it is being added to the recreational crabbing community. I'm all for good data collection that can build a solid scientific resource management plan.

But....before we had the mandatory CRC reporting requirements, WDFW biologists used phone surveys to extrapolate catch data. As I recall, the licenses pulled involved less than 20,000 and not all of them were actually interviewed. In 2007 somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 CRC reports returned (30% of the 200K CRCs). I'm assuming the responses were across the board from no crabbing to the folks who were out regularly. I'm not a statistician, but it would appear that the larger sample size should provide better data the smaller sample universe.

A 100% sample size should be strived for. I'm going to save myself $10 a year by reporting my catch information. I just wonder just how many CRC reports are needed for a statistically valid data set on recreational crab harvest.