RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Waterman Ty Farrington has spent his winters hauling up abandoned crab pots, making a fraction of the income he made dredging blue crabs from the muck of the Chesapeake Bay.
"It isn't enough to pay my mortgage, to pay my bills — to survive," Farrington said Monday after a legislative committee gave him hope he might return to the bay's waters from December through March some day in the future.
The Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee killed a House bill that would have allowed state regulators to extend by more than one year a ban on the bay's winter crab dredge. The Virginia Marine Resources Commission is limited to enacting the ban on a year-to-year basis, and it has done so in each of the past three years.
The legislation would have allowed closings for successive years, and watermen and industry officials feared it was the first step to a permanent ban.
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