The last part of your question I didn't fully understand, but we don't have any whalesafe gear yet, right? That's not part of our fishery. Really, we don't want it to be part of the fishery until it's proven, tested and true that we can put something there so that we can successfully retrieve our gear and do it in a safe manner.
Earlier I said that basically it's not just the economic hit on gear replacement; it's actually the sustainable issue, the use of the resource. Ghost fishing does an unquantified amount of damage on the bottom. Over the years we have adapted, such as by putting biodegradable twine in our pots, but over time this has an impact on the crab, especially when they're in the molting process.
We've done everything we possibly can in regard to management. There's been co-operative management with Fisheries and Oceans too, I must say, over the years that I've chaired the fleets, and basically any decisions that were done were done jointly. We look at what the resource is and how it's behaving and what you do with twine sizes for grading the crab on the bottom, not disturbing the females, and we have the biodegradable twine in the event that there's lost gear.
The problem now is that we're seeing a very huge cost in gear replacement, because we have to replace the gear every four years. It's made out of steel; the steel naturally rusts out and the pot gets lighter, so the pots go all over the ocean floor. Offshore, we use 100 pots in the string close to 20 fathoms apart. This is a two-mile string, and we only use two haul-up lines in two miles. We have 12 strings of gear for the both, so it's 1,200 pots we're licensed for. It's a significant investment that fishers have in the ocean at the time. If you're out there looking around to be able to say if you're going to be able to haul today, the day you can't haul your gear because you're trying to keep from busting it off is a day that's costing you money, and it's costing the industry money, a lot of money.