Monterey Bay Fishermen Take Action by Cleaning Up Lost Fishing Gear
Crab buoys found remaining after the season closure, spotted and reported by Peggy West Stap of Marine Life Studies.
Moss Landing fisherman Calder Deyerle motors his boat through the Monterey Bay in late May scanning the water. He has his eyes out for Dungeness crab buoys. With the crab season having ended a few weeks prior, there shouldn’t be any gear left in the water, but there are many reasons why crab pots can get lost.
“The biggest reason for lost gear is kelp paddies. Further north there are a lot of log jams when rivers flood out,” says Deyerle, a second-generation fisherman out of Moss Landing. “You can’t leave pots around when the whales are really thick, so we’re out here to make sure there aren’t any left in the water after the season.”
Deyerle and four other fishermen from Monterey to Santa Cruz have teamed up with the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust to survey the bay’s crab grounds for lost Dungeness crab gear and respond to reports of lost gear made by other boaters. Last year, fishermen working through the Trust’s Lost Gear Recovery program collected nineteen crab pots from Monterey Bay, with eleven belonging to commercial fishermen and eight to recreational.*
This is the fourth year the Trust has run the lost gear recovery program, but it’s the first year it is working under the California Fish and Wildlife’s Trap Gear Retrieval Permit, a new state mandated program to manage gear left in the water after the close of fishing seasons. The permit allows the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust to promote further collaboration between the state regulators and the local fishing community, says Oliviya Wyse, program manager with the Trust.
The Trust’s lost gear recovery program and the state’s gear retrieval program come on the heels of a spike of whale entanglements in fishing gear that created negative press for fishermen and put both the state regulators and fishermen in the crosshairs of legal action. The spike was largely due to climate-related ocean phenomena including the warm water blob that changed whale migration patterns, and high levels of domoic acid in Dungeness crabs that pushed fishing efforts into times of year when whales migrate. Fishermen responded by creating best practices of how to rig and set gear in ways that dramatically reduce the possibility of entanglement.
Commercial Dungeness crab pots recovered by Monterey recovery vessel, F/V Ocean Warrior. The owners were located and gear was returned.
To take further action, fishermen, in conjunction with the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, are working to eliminate lost gear. In addition to getting lost in kelp paddies and log jams, as Deyerle mentioned above, boats sometimes run over gear, dragging it into deeper water, and storms can whip up the waves moving crab gear around. One of the difficulties of lost gear recovery is timing the tides. Crab gear weighed down by debris or pushed into deeper water can typically only be recovered in very low or minus tides.
“People assume the fishermen are being negligent, but they’re not,” Wyse says. “Fishermen don’t intentionally leave gear out there — they don’t want to buy new gear and go through the hassle of rigging it.”
A lot goes into a Dungeness crab pot. They resemble large wire mesh and stainless steel hockey pucks that weigh up to 150 pounds. The steel frames are wrapped in thick rubber inner tube material for cushion while moving around. They cost fishermen around $300 each and require hours of additional work before they are ready to be fished.
Each crabber has their unique way of rigging their gear, but all must fabricate straps to keep the tap lids closed and crabs in while the pots are hauled to the surface. Shots of rope must be measured, cut and spliced. Bait jars are attached with a combination of rubber bands, rope and metal hooks. All of this is done by hand with an efficient elegance designed for ease of use on the water while being strong enough to withstand the harsh elements.
Suffice it to say, fishermen do not want to lose their crab gear. Not only does each lost pot cost money and time, but it also goes against their ethos as stewards of the sea. Fishermen want to keep the waters they work on clean, free of debris and eliminate any potential for whale entanglements in lost gear.
“Most of us here in Moss Landing try to bring back lost pots we see during the season and return them — we all know each other,” Deyerle says. “But through the lost gear recovery program we’re more organized about it.”
*Commercial lost gear recovery efforts aren’t allowed to target sport gear, but when a recreational crab trap is accidentally pulled to the surface, fishermen who work with the Trust felt it was more responsible to take the gear back to shore rather than letting the sport gear pose as a continued entanglement risk.