Commercial Crab 'Fisherman' Fined

Surrey Now
Published: Friday, August 29, 2008
A Surrey man has been busted and fined for illegal crab fishing practices.

On June 5, Dinh Ly Hoang was convicted of two offences: catching and retaining undersized Dungeness crab, and failing to return the undersized crab to where they had been caught. He pled guilty to the charges in Surrey provincial court.

On August 9, 2007, fishery officers conducted a licence inspection of the vessel CEE GEE 1 off Roberts Bank in the Strait of Georgia. During the inspection, the officers noted 326 of the 688 Dungeness crab on board were female or less than 165 mm in width, a direct violation of commercial crab licence conditions.

In another inspection on August 23, as the vessel CEE GEE 1 was returning to port in Steveston Harbour, fishery officers observed that a significant number of the Dungeness crab on board were female or undersized.

Hoang was fined $7,000, to be paid to the Receiver General of Canada, and had his crab fishing licence suspended for one year.

The court ordered that the fine be used for promoting education, proper management and control of the crab fishery and crab habitat, as well as for the purpose of shellfish study, enhancement and management.

Anyone with information on illegal fishing activity is encouraged to call the DFO's toll-free violation reporting line at 1-800-465-4336.

:beerchug: Nice to see, although a longer suspension would be better in my opinion