Here's my view on the compliance issue: I believe there are recreational crabbers and sport crabbers. Nowadays crabbing opens during the nicer weather bringing out the ski and play type boats. These folks bring along the crab pots to drop while they run around and play. I think these are the recreational crabbers. Not really sportsman so to speak but do enjoy a few outdoor things from time to time but it's not a passion to them. They're inexperienced and unskilled but it doesn't take much skill to crab and be successful. They may have read the rules but a probably going by more hear-say then anything else. Along comes LE. They see a fancy $60k SeaRay with a couple hotties tanning on the bow and a couple jock straps out flexing their mussels. A perfect opportunity to swoop in and check out the eye candy close up and make the boyfriends look like douche bags as they write them a ticket for "soft and undersize."

Then I feel there is the sport crabber. These are the people like myself and many here. Fishing and crabbing are a passion and a way of life. I have a copy of the regs and a tide book on my desk at work, come Monday morning I'm already planning the next weekend. These will be the people in fishing boats. So to me it would be pretty easy to figure who has a better chance of being in compliance.

So yeah I think it's easy to pick out who's who out there. I feel if they ran a compliance check during the winter fishery the results would drastically from the summer ones. Simply because you've removed all the recreational crabbers from the equation.

Dave here's one from '05

Violation Arrest Warning Total

Undersized 48 24 72
Over Limit 15 1 16
Soft Shell 1 30 31
Fail to Record 48 78 126
Gear 3 3 6
License 5 9 14
Fishing 28 25 53
Other 22 5 27

Total 170 175 345

Dock hours 50
Boat hours 266
Total contacts 879
Crab citations 120
Total citations 170
Crab warnings 125
Total warnings 175

Crab compliance rate 70%
Total compliance rate 63%