It was a long slog down to Colonial Beach yesterday -- whoever runs Mapquest and said it would take 2 hours and 20 minutes to get there from Baltimore obviously has never encountered the highway known as Route 301. It took me every bit of three hours to get down there, and the other reporters I met (from Annapolis and Richmond) told of drives that were almost as long.

Once there, we waited about half an hour for O'Malley's chopper to arrive. Then there was about 40 minutes of introductions of everyone on the Potomac River Fisheries Commission, a plug for the artist whose canvases decorated the conference room, and some speeches that didn't really focus on the crabs.

Then it was DNR crab expert Lynn Fegley's turn to give a crab presentation that she, and probably many of the reporters who have heard it, have nearly memorized by now. Yesterday's included a bit of new information from the winter dredge survey, which showed juvenile crabs slightly up and spawning crabs slightly down. Hmm. I'm thinking that getting a story out of this will be challenging.

Then, at about 4:30 (event was supposed to end at 4) we go outside for speeches by Governors Tim Kaine and Martin O'Malley. Kaine talks first, for about 10 minutes, about how the states need to work together to protect crabs.

Then it's O'Malley's turn. He, too, talks about the crab for awhile, how it's important, and then he says he and Kaine are pushing for an immediate 34 percent reduction in the crab harvest.

Wow. Okay, an act of news has been committed. He wraps up, questions are taken, and the chopper whisks him away after a couple of photos. I look down at the press packet I got when we got outside and sure enough there is a press release on the 34 percent reduction.

I tried to leave quickly so I could make our impending deadline, but I didn't get far before someone from Potomac River Fisheries Commission stopped me to talk about female sponge crabs.

(My one question for Kaine was, "If you want to increae the population, why does Virginia continue to let watermen harvest pregnant crabs?")

Kaine didn't really answer, referrring the question to his staff to sort out. But the Potomac fellow informed me that Maryland watermen almost certainly take out pregnant crabs, too; the Maryland crabs are just too early in their pregnancies for us to see their eggs.

In other words, two or three months pregnant as opposed to nine. He asked me if I thought it was any more okay to harvest them in early stages than it was at the end. I didn't really have an answer, but I'm thinking to myself, this is an argument I always managed to avoid in college, and I'm not going to start discussing it now.