The crawfish season will close on March 31, and according to Assistant Fisheries Superintendent Clement Campbell, in the past some restaurants on the island have breached fisheries regulations by purchasing crawfish to serve to their customers during the closed season.
"I would like for the restaurants to stop purchasing these undersized crawfish from these sellers, please," Mr. Campbell said. "That’s called supply and demand. If there is a demand, someone will find a supply. So we beg the restaurants…and we will be checking these restaurants too. We will put them on notice that we will be checking them without notice for their seafood supply, especially the crawfish.
"According to the law, [the crawfish] will be confiscated and [the restaurant owners] will be charged. We get tips. There are quite a number of restaurants that we suspect, that we know are buying undersized crawfish and we will be checking them in the very near future. They know who they are. We want them to know that we’re coming."
Mr. Campbell added, "We are not here to hurt anybody’s business or stop anyone from making a living; we are just trying to straighten this thing out so later on down the road your kids and my kids and their kids can have something to harvest."
He said some businesspeople are guilty of purchasing undersized crawfish during open season.
"We know who you are," Mr. Campbell said. "So it is best that they just behave."
He asked members of the public to assist the Department of Marine Resources and the police to identify people who catch crawfish during the closed season.
Mr. Campbell said there is an average of 30 arrests per year in the northern region for breaching this particular fisheries regulation.
"That is ridiculous, but what happens is that we can’t cover all the bases, so what we rely on are other fishermen informing us of what other fishermen are doing because it affects them," he said.
Mr. Campbell said that while many people who purchase or harvest crawfish during the closed season might feel that they are not doing anything harmful they are breaking the law.
"…If we continue to do it to ourselves, in the year 2020 we would find ourselves in other people’s waters trying to get fish, so we have to put a grip on it now and stop it," he said.
Mr. Campbell said fishermen who are caught with undersized crawfish often use the excuse that they didn’t know that they were so small until they brought them up.
"They try to do it and get away with it," he said.
"What I find the fishermen doing with the bag of lobster is putting the big ones on the top of the bag and the small ones to the bottom, so they bring you a bag of crawfish and you can see all these big crawfish and when you open it up you would see at least three dozen small ones in the middle under five and a half inches."
Depending on the volume of crawfish people are caught with during closed season, they could be made to pay fines ranging from $500 to $5,000 or more.
A prison sentence is left up to the judge’s discretion.
While noting that there are many good, honest fishermen in The Bahamas, Mr. Campbell said there are many who intentionally break the law.
"Some fishermen who duck and try to break the rules would come in at midnight or nine or ten o’clock [at night] when they figure no one is looking. A lot of that has been happening," he said.
He said the department works with the police and anticipates the establishment of a Defence Force base in Grand Bahama – as announced by the minister of national security last year – to help address the problem.
The season will reopen on August 1.
- Austin DWI - New York DWI