As far as the consultation leading up to our fishery, I'm going to speak to the lobster fishery first off and foremost. I'll leave it to Martin to talk more about the crab fishery. In the lobster fishery, there was zero consultation going into the spring fishery. The North Atlantic right whale round table was last year in November. We all know it focused on the snow crab fishery, because it was snow crab gear the whales were entangled in. Traditionally we fish lobsters inside the 120 line, inside 120 feet of water, and when you look at the historical data of the North Atlantic right whales, which have been in the gulf long before 2017, you see they very seldom, if ever, venture into that shallow water, because the feed is more out in the deeper water.
We went all winter thinking that we were kind of.... I don't want to say off the hook, but we weren't given any indication that we would be part of the mitigation measures. About two weeks before our fishery started, we started to get a bit of a sniff of wind that—wait a minute—it's not just the crab fishery that's going to be implicated in all of this. It's also going to be the lobster fishery and all other fixed-gear fisheries.
Then our conditions came out about 10 days before the fishery, maybe a week before. That's the other part of the issue. This whole year the timeliness of conditions being released to us has been a nightmare. I mean everything and all species. One prime example is our mackerel gillnet fishery, where my harvesters received their condition 12 hours before they started fishing. You try to plan for a fishery with 12 hours' notice.