Yes. It's mainly to do with what I said about the stock, and also with the difference that we are a small boat, inshore zone. We only fish day trips. We're not an offshore zone.
Our willingness to go along, I guess I would say, with DFO on introducing changes to the fishery.... We were leaders in changing the design of our traps. We were the first to adopt a conical-style trap instead of a square trap, which science says reduces the amount of soft shell or white shell being caught, which protects your stock. We did that.
As I said in the introduction, we had the first true co-management agreement in Canada, to the extent that we were integrated with paying for enforcement, air flights, and paying for science and that kind of stuff. We're unique in that aspect.
We're unique, as I said before, in the geology of our ocean floor compared to other areas. We're small. We are really the last inshore zone in the southern gulf--that I know of--that hasn't been assimilated into area 12, from the P.E.I. zones to the former area 18. They're all now part of the one big zone. We feel we are very unique, and we'd like to keep our status where we are.
We deal with local management in Antigonish. We're really managed out of Antigonish, but as the southern gulf has been considered one biological stock now, we're playing with new players again. Now we're in New Brunswick and we're dealing out of the Moncton office.
We conducted a spring survey just three weeks prior to our fishery, and for us that's a huge scientific tool to determine what's in that small zone--20 by 60 miles is very small; it's very easy for snow crab to migrate out of there. When a survey is conducted in September, it leaves until the next July for that stock to naturally die or to migrate out. We actually had that problem, and we had that problem in 2004 when we went fishing on a fall survey and the crab weren't there. There was a huge reduction in the number. That's why we sat down with management, with DFO science, and said that we had to do something to ensure the stock was there--whether it's good or bad. And that's what we did. It's been working for us, and we hope we can continue with that.
We're still operating under the co-management agreement, which is good until 2013. That's even though, due to court cases and the loss of revenue options, which have hindered us, we're still plugging away at it, and we hope to continue doing that.