Groot Jan is walking along the beach at Paternoster with a loaded Pick ‘n Pay bag in one arm. He’s just about to get to the parking lot when marine inspector Piet arrives with his whistle. Piet asks him about the contents of his bag, if he’s aware of the West Coast Rock Lobster regulations and the open season dates? “Nee oom, these are not kreef for eating, these are my pets. I am just bringing them to the beach for a swim.”
Jan walks back to the shore and tosses 6 small kreef into the sea. He then starts walking in the other direction, and Piet runs after him. “Meneer, what about your pets, what about your crayfish” Jan turns around slowly, looks Piet in the eye and says”What crayfish?”
It’s an oldie, and way better round a weskus braai fire but I love it anyway. Back to the task at hand, the West Coast Rock Lobster (AKA Kreef) recreational season opened last weekend. What has gone from November to Easter is now just 12 days. There have been reductions across the board (if you want to just compare year on year)
I’m not going to wade into the debate on fishing a dwindling resource but I do like to do the sums on this one, as the geniuses at DAFF play with some funky spreadsheets. If we look at 38 tonnes of kreef, and to make it simple lets say average size kreef is about 500gr(a thumbsuck*). Then you’ve got roughly 80 000 kreef to catch in this “allocation”. Looking at the actual days:
- From 15 December 2018 to 16 December 2018 (2 days);
- From 22 December 2018 to 23 December 2018 (2 days);
- On 26 December 2018 (1 day);
- From 29 December 2018 to 1 January 2019 (4 days); and
- From 19 April 2019 to 21 April 2019 (3 days).
This is really a holidays only affair, and often has extreme south east winds blowing making boat fishing difficult. I doubt many will fill their quota on all 12 of these days, and catch their 48 kreef. Some people will buy a licence for a once-off fishing day too. No one knows what the average amount of kreef is caught per licence, the only data that could point to it is the amount of licences sold and then a survey on average catch. Either way, if anything less than 7000 licences are taken out, this number will be wrong.
This guy seems to agree
https://www.dailyvoice.co.za/news/crayfishing-season-fury-18175419
Don't stop moving 