Thank you.
Since about 2000, we have done a soft-shell charter program. We test the crab to see when they're moulting. When they moult is when they mate. If we fish on the moulting crab, they're very fragile; we kill them. It's just silly to fish the moulting crab; they're not marketable, and it's illegal to retain soft-shell crab.
We started these charters around 2000. Prior to that the fishery was open for 365 days a year, and we were probably harming the resource. Fisheries brought in an ultra-conservative closure date of March 1 to August 1, months that the fishery would be closed to protect the moulting crab. We started the charters around the same year. We test the hardness of the crab shell and gather other useful data for fisheries: sex, injury codes, the size of the crab so we know the stock assessment, and that kind of stuff. As a result of these charters, on average, over the last five years we have attained an additional 67 days of fishing per season.
The opening, which comes by August 1, or sometimes as early as June or July, is when the bulk of the crab are caught. We probably harvest 80% of the crab catch in those first six weeks. The crabs come out of the deep and migrate into the shallows to moult and mate. If they're ready to go in June, which it looks like they might be this year, and you don't fish them until August 1, you have a chance of missing the entire fishery. This science is not just giving us additional fishing time; it's allowing us to fish the crab when they are harvestable and in their best marketable condition—clean, shiny shells with no barnacles, and stuff like that. It really helps in the marketing of them.
Just to show you the chaos that's going on, this year we asked the fisheries department for funding and they said they had none. We were open in January and February. Three of our fishermen who had done the testing in the past volunteered their time and their vessels and their crews' wages to do testing. We brought in the minimum amount of data that our fisheries person thought we should have, so we have some data this year. Now we're closed. We are in a situation where we have to test in May, June, and July if we want to open before August 1. Our fishermen are going to have to pay. They're not crabbing otherwise, because they're closed. They're going to have to use their own gear, their own boat, pay their crew, pay for their own grub, and pay their own fuel in order to test. Otherwise, they won't have a season. Running one of these boats is probably about $2,500 a day. You're looking at the fishermen going into their own pockets for a hundred grand or more, just so they can have a fishery.
The way the data is shaping up, if we open on August 1 we're going to miss them. The crab are going to be gone. After they've been up in the shallows fooling around, they take off. We don't know where they go, because we don't have that science. We can't catch them once they get out of the shallows. If we don't do that testing this year, we stand to lose the biggest portion of our fishery. The landed value in Prince Rupert is about $22 million a year. We could miss that whole thing.
If charters were properly funded by DFO, the approximate cost of a full charter package would be about $300,000. It's a small investment for a big return for the government.