The opening night of crab season on Monterey Bay brings trials, triumph and a whole lot of hustle
On the eve of crab season, Calder Deyerle stages crab pots at his house in Elkhorn before moving them to Moss Landing Harbor. Photo by Nic Coury and courtesy of the Monterey County Weekly.
This story was first published in the Monterey County Weekly on Dec. 21, 2017, but it’s still relevant today as Monterey Bay Dungeness crab fishermen and women are on the water, having just started their season after nearly two months of delays. In the story, writer David Schmalz takes readers onto the water where he describes a fisherman’s trade with vivid detail. As much as things change, some things remain the same for Monterey Bay’s commercial fishing fleet: an attention to the natural flows of the Pacific Ocean, a concern for nature, and an indomitable work ethic. Here’s a lightly edited excerpt.
Calder Deyerle, a Moss Landing native and second-generation fisherman, has a lot on his mind. At 1:40am, he pulls into a parking lot outside his family’s fish processing plant in Moss Landing Harbor. Deyerle’s 27-foot boat is ready to go, and a few minutes later, he motors it out of the harbor.
“Never set gear on the edge of the [Monterey Submarine] Canyon, because it’s going to go bye-bye!” he says with a flourish, adding that his dad knows every fisherman in the harbor.
As Deyerle comes upon his first string of buoys at around 3am, the lights along the Monterey County coast, from Castroville to Pacific Grove, glow in the distance.
Deyerle fires up the generator that powers his boat’s mechanical hauler, and noise drowns out everything else. He then grabs a long hook and uses it to reel in the first pot’s rope after the hook catches on a buoy. Once the rope is in his rubber-gloved hands, he threads it through a couple mechanical pulleys and flips a switch to start reeling the pot in.
The process moves fast, about five minutes or less per pot. Deyerle lifts the pot onto the side of the boat and starts pulling crabs out. If they’re too soft or too small, he throws them back to sea; if not, he chucks them into his holding container. If any crabs are on the cusp size-wise – they’re required to be a minimum of 6.25 inches across the front edge of the shell – he measures them with a metal ruler that reads: “Englund Marine.”