Gloucester crabbers are having a hard time catching crabs this summer.

Ricky Hall of Gloucester pulled into the dock on Aberdeen Creek Monday morning with just five bushels of jimmies and four bushels of sooks. He last fished his 350 pots on Saturday, so that was two days’ worth of crabs.

"It’s about as sorry as it can get," he said. "People say they’ve never seen the crab population as sorry as it is now."

E.C. Hogge has given up crabbing for now.

"I don’t see no sense putting pots over," he said. "You can’t catch enough to do no good."

Lewis Brown agreed. "You’ve gotta make something," he said.

Crabs were fairly abundant in the spring, said Hall, but even then it was rare for someone to catch the 51-bushel limit that was in effect until May 31.

All of the men said that prices have been rising on bait and on the wire, lead and rope needed to make crab pots, but the price of crabs has remained static. They said they’ve been getting anywhere from $35 to $65 a bushel, but even at the higher price, the yield is too low to pay what it costs to operate a boat and pay for help.

Not only that, but there’s a big difference between what the waterman gets for his catch and what the retail customer pays for it. Hall said the typical retail customer can pay as much for a dozen crabs as the waterman gets for a whole bushel. Two days before Mother’s Day, his son called a retail outlet and found out it was selling crabs for $235 a bushel or $48 a dozen.

The men said that crab buyers all appear to talk among themselves and determine what the price is going to be, so there’s no bargaining. While crabbers used to get a ticket every day with their daily catch listed, now the buyer doesn’t let them know what their catch and total are until the end of the week. Billy Bonniville said he’s been trying to get watermen to join together and address the problem, but so far he hasn’t met with any success.

The men who work for the boat owners are finding it harder to make ends meet, as well. Terry West has been able to get by since he quit school as a teenager and started crabbing and scalloping for other people, but he’s not making any money these days. He said he only made $275 over a six-week period because the man he was working for was paying him a share of the proceeds rather than a daily rate. West doesn’t have a car, so his options for employment are limited.

West is behind on child support payments for his 17-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son, and he’s afraid he’ll be put in jail.

"Ever since the recession hit, I went on downhill and can’t get back up," he said. "I hope there’s a good oyster season if I don’t go to jail, cause that’s the only thing that’s going to bring me out."

All of the men pointed to several factors that are affecting the abundance of crabs. They said there are too many crab pots in the water these days, particularly peeler pots, which catch small, young crabs as they shed.

"Common sense tells you if you take all the babies out of the water, you ain’t gonna have no grownups," said Hall. "You take all the young people out of a town, and pretty soon you’re gonna have a ghost town."

In addition, there are limits on the number of regular crab pots a waterman can set, but the men said the regulations aren’t being enforced by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. But the blame doesn’t all fall on the man who’s catching the crabs, they said. Restoration efforts for other species have resulted in an increase in predators such as rockfish, sea turtles, croaker and trout, and "all these big, fancy waterfront homes" are putting insecticides, weed killers and fertilizers on their lawns, so, said Hall, "you have a heavy downpour of rain, and where does all that go?"

In what could be a first, the men are all calling for more regulation of the industry to cut down on the number of pots that can be set, and they’re asking that VMRC enforce the regulations already on the books.

West said the younger generation doesn’t stand a chance of making a go at crabbing.

"Crabbing is more like a hobby these days," he said. "It’s the worst, messed-upest year I’ve ever seen."

Winter dredge survey

Rob O’Reilly, chief of fisheries management at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, wasn’t surprised at the low crab catches. He said this year’s winter dredge survey had determined that the stock of adult crabs that would be available in the spring was only around 178 million, with 97 million of those being females.

Last year, he said, the survey counted 254 million crabs, with 194 million of them female. With female crabs down by half, he said "it stands to reason that what was available wouldn’t last."

But O’Reilly said he expects the low harvests to represent only a temporary lull. The winter dredge survey showed that there were 583 million small crabs poised to reach harvestable size in late summer and fall. Charts show it to be the highest number of small crabs counted in at least the past 22 years. The last time the juvenile crab abundance approached such numbers was in 1997, when 512 million small crabs were counted during the dredge survey.

Fifty-five percent of the peeler harvest usually occurs in May, said O’Reilly, so that harvest should be lower in the upcoming season. Further, he said that the peeler harvest has been stable at one million pounds annually for the past four years, while the harvest of hard crabs has risen from 20 million pounds to 30 million pounds.

O’Reilly said that the winter dredge survey, now in its 23rd season, has over the past six years been a very reliable predictor of the number of crabs that will be available during the following season.