is the island slowing ?

I don't know for sure about that. {prepare for a rant...} I'm from central Nassau.

Over the years I have found that Long Island has pitifully few places where people can access places to drop a crab trap.

Even using Google Earth's satellite view doesn't help. Just when I think I see a likely spot on Google Earth, like a park or a marina with bulkheads/docks/floating docks, it turns out to be either for residents/marina clients only or there's no parking allowed on the streets near the likely spots.

We live on a big, beautiful island, with an enormous amount of coastline (especially if you consider all the canals with homes on them) and over 90 percent of the crabbing access is restricted. You can fish from the surf to your hearts content, but crabbing? Ha.

The places where anyone can come and crab are so well known, that they are now over fished (over-crabbed?) for the season. We went to Captree State park last week in the afternoon. The tide had been going out for an hour. There were plenty of eager, honest folks with families trying their luck at crabbing, fishing for snappers and more.

After a couple of hours of either too few and very small crabs or no crabs at all, we moved to another spot in the park and set up again. Strolling around, watching the people, I saw that as soon as unhappy crabbers moved on, other hopeful crabbers would set up in the same spots.

I then realized, that at this location (at least), the area has been gleaned of legal sized blue claws. Unless it rains for a few days, which would probably reduce the number of crabbers temporarily and allow some crabs to move in and fill the present crab-vacuum of Captree boat basin, it just isn't worth the toll.

Without a doubt, there are plenty of good crabbing locations, but they are all privately owned canals or marinas (or town-restricted like Lindenhurst dock.) It's not a fun day if I'm worried about getting a ticket or being chased out by the 'authorities'. We like to take drives along the shore, looking, but all I see are bulkheads at the ends of short deadends that are devoid of fishing/crabbing folk.

But enough rant. We're taking another drive tomorrow and I've got to go back to Google Earth to look for places to check out.