I've actually spent some time thinking about how to turn crab fishing into a game. There's plenty of things that can translate well into good game play.
1) customizing and upgrading the ship and crew: Like any racing game you could spend hours on end tweaking and modding your ship or grinding to get enough money for that "ferrari" of fishing boats with gold plated boom cranes, led effects on the portholes, and spinners on the propellers.
2) strategy and exploration: RTS is all about running around in circles turning over rocks, fondling dungeon walls, and generally looking for the sweet spot to mine some gold. If there was a multi-player aspect and they play Derby style where it's all you can catch in a finite time frame, it could get really competitive.
3) involving environment: If the fluid EFX are good enough and the environment modeling nice enough, you could spend all kinds of time just looking at the scenery of Alaska.
The bad points are:
1) that there are tons of idle minutes spend doing nothing interesting. If you have some sort of time acceleration feature, then multiplayer goes out the window. And if it is real time, most of the pots aren't going to catch the sexy "big" numbers of crab in the 2-3 hours that most groups of players can schedule to play at the same time.
2) Half the fun is being on the deck and tossing the crabs around. Sorting crab might be fun with a mouse or wiimote as some sort of speed test, but no one wants to joystick some hand cursor around the sorting table over and over again for every pot that comes up.
I tried the flash game version on the discovery site. Absolutely horrendous.
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