Crab Season Confidential: A Look Back, Current Realities and What's Next
By Mark C Anderson, May 6, 2024
The 2024 crab season was many things for area fishermen—a fleeting endeavor, a true lifeline, a preamble for more management decisions.
Now that it has ended south of the Sonoma-Mendocino county line—as of April 8—it’s a good time to look back at how it went, how current experimental permits keep it going, for some, and how potential regulatory changes will affect its future.
THE RECENT PAST
Looking back at the 2024 season, key takeaways fall into good news and bad news bins.
The good news: Despite being restricted to deploying half their gear, local fishermen pulled in a sizable quantity of crab (exact 2024 numbers from the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, or CDFW, will be available in about a year). At a decent, though not ideal price—and after the absence of a salmon season—that provided desperately needed funds.
The Fisheries Trust spoke to a number of fishermen from across the Central Coast about the 81-day season, and the main refrains were consistent: “It was OK,” “It was short, but fine,” “Not great, could’ve been better,” and, as Half Moon Bay fisherman Don Marshall put it, “If I had been able to fish all of my gear, I would’ve been able to have best year I’ve had. Those are the years with crab you need to balance out the bad years.”
So maybe not all great news there, but some additional good news is that, at the time this is published, the 2024 crab season met with zero confirmed gear entanglements with humpback whales, blue whales or leatherback turtles.
And, to that end, whale-safe gear continues to be tested (and, hopefully, improved), though it remains controversial—and divisive—among the fleet. Finally, endangered humpback whale populations are steadily increasing and crabbers are getting better and better at adjusting how they fish to avoid entanglements, even with the presence of more whales.
Meanwhile fishers are working to retrieve as much lost gear from the water as they can, on their own time and dime. “Nobody makes money doing that, but we all go out and pick up everything we come across,” says longtime crabber and fisherman Dick Ogg. “We want to do all we can to reduce potential for interaction.”
The bad news: The season opened after the lucrative Thanksgiving and Christmas sales booms passed.
Quick, uncertain crabbing seasons with later starts and sooner conclusions are now the norm.
And things don’t exactly feel promising on the water, as many local fishermen think Monterey Bay crab prospects are only going to get worse.
THE TURBULENT PRESENT
Onto the moment at hand. As this publishes, around 20 different boats continue to crab Monterey Bay legally, though the season is closed.
Each operates under an experimental fishing permit (commonly called EFPs, granted by CDFW) designed to test out the feasibility of so-called “pop-up” or “ropeless” traps that don't dangle vertical lines from buoys to traps below for long. (Instead buoys remain at depth, and surface only on demand, via signal from the boat.) Many of those boats are partnering with gear developers or nonprofits like Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
While acknowledging concerns over equitable access (more on that in a minute), Greg Wells, gear innovations manager for the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, observes increasing collaboration with crabbers who, in exchange for specialized traps, buoys and training, provide data on gear performance, conditions, and suggestions on refining rigs.
“I think there’s more openness to new options now,” he says. “More are willing to explore it as a way to extend their season.”
EFPs trigger strong feelings from a range of perspectives. Some, like Ogg, feel their limited availability creates a rift. (While the number of West Coast crab permits eclipses 340, only around 20 boats are fishing with EFPs.)
“The EFP process allows people to do things when everybody else is closed off,” he says. “I’m all about experimenting, creating opportunity, but when we do this, it pits fisherman against fisherman.”
Marshall chose not to test new gear to avoid that. “I don’t want to be a part of something that doesn’t have a democratic system, where there are hundreds of crab permits but access is only handed to a small percentage,” he says. “I didn’t want my peers to be looking at me negatively.”
Sea conservation nonprofit Oceana’s senior scientist Geoff Shester has been a staunch advocate of testing out pop-ups, saying, “Our goal is to get a healthy, vibrant, viable spring fishery.”
“Alternative gear provides the potential to restore some of the crabbing opportunities that are a thing of the past,” he says. “The idea we’re going to have the [historic] Dungeness crab fishery with only traditional gear isn’t realistic. Pop up gear isn’t a threat, it’s an opportunity.”
Lisa Damrosch, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA), doesn’t harbor quite the same optimism.
“There is a potential that rope from this gear type that fouls or deploys incorrectly could increase entanglement risks to marine mammals and navigational hazards for vessels that can't see this gear,” she writes in a statement. “There is hope that this on-demand/pop-up gear can become a tool used to keep the fishing season open longer in the spring. However, all fishermen, including those who have participated in early testing, agree that this gear type is unworkable for the beginning of the season when participation in the fishery is high and entanglement risk is low."
Don’t let the hype get you too hopeful, she adds: “This is not a silver bullet. It’s a new innovation to maintain a small opportunity, being marketed as more significant than it is.”
San Francisco-based fisherman Brand Little, one of the first testers of pop-up gear a season ago and a member of the California Dungeness Crab Working Group advisory body, agrees: Alternative gear can’t work at peak season, and is tedious to use. He nonetheless chooses to use pop-up gear, which he knows makes him a lightning rod.
“I’m very polarizing within the fleet—everyone knows of me and they have an opinion,” he says, noting his and other testers’ gear has been vandalized in retaliation. “Some say they are with me 100 percent, others threaten my gear and livelihood. It’s insane.”
A closer look at his experience provides context. Like Damrosch and his fellow fishermen, he knows the vast majority of crab tonnage comes in at the start of the season, but demand for fresh crab persists into the spring, even if there are fewer to catch. And, while using pop-up gear is wildly more time- and cost-intensive, he can fetch a better price at market and obtain some supplementary income, however modest.
“I don’t think pop up gear can work as a career: It slows me down four- to five-fold, and is expensive,” he says. “But our opportunity for conventional [crabbing] now is a short winter fishery that might last 60-80 days. That’s not enough, and this lets me at least have a part time spring job without working at McDonald’s. I can’t live on it, but I can’t live without it.”
The most important point, Little continues, is that calling for a return to past management isn’t practical, even if he believes the crab fishery’s impact on the growing population of humpbacks is exaggerated.
“Fishing doesn’t have the impact on whales that people think, which leads to a frustrated fleet, so some want to fight back, but they don’t understand they’re fighting against a big governmental agency without the money to do it,” he says. “Is the evaluation of impact and regulation wrong? Yes. Do you have a fighting chance of changing it? Absolutely not. After five or six years of fighting, some of us have said it’s not a fight we’ll win.”
THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Finally, to the future, and the regulations taking shape, via the next Risk Assessment Mitigation Program (RAMP) hearing slotted for May 21, with the comment period now open. (More information on the hearing and how to log commentsWC appears at the end of this piece.)
The six proposed RAMP regulations can be a little dry and vague; #1, for example, is “Adjust definition of Confirmed Entanglement through removal of Impact Score, and how it is calculated”—but the overall goal is easier to understand, as RAMP Working Group lead and CDFW scientist Ryan Bartling points out.
“A lot of the proposal language is technical, but it’s all designed to simplify the process and add clarity,” he says.
A new management tool he flags as potentially helpful while whales are present is “active tending.” Rather than setting pots for a period of days, fishermen would deploy fewer pots, and check them every four hours—the “equivalent of day fishing,” Bartlings says—which can provide access to earlier season fishing (and the holiday market), using small amounts of gear and reducing risk.
He’s among those, fishermen and regulators included, who hopes a more predictable season is possible, even if it starts later than it has historically.
“If we observe a certain number of whales, we know the season’s automatically not going to open until Jan. 1, and the fleet would like to go out sooner of course, but it allows for planning, hiring crew, getting bait, and when to load up,” he says. “What fishermen want is certainty. They understand delays, but want to know for sure they’re going to go.”
Fisherman Don Marshall feels that’s not too much to ask.
“There are too many complications and uncertainty around when the season starts and when it ends,” he says. “Seasons are getting shorter and shorter and shorter, now with less gear. I never saw it deteriorating this rapidly. I’d like to see a hard start date, even if it’s Jan. 15, to allow whales to pass by, then make it 60- or 75-day season with all of our traps.
“That way you have the maximum chance to make hay when the sun is shining.”
It’s almost like you can hear Marshall asking the parties involved to in solutions to strive like crabbers.
“Crabbing requires an ability to work physicality and pushes you intellectually too—you have to be a mechanic, engineer, manager, supervisor, also a fisherman, and an accountant,” Marshall says. “I enjoy crabbing because it pushes me as a human being farther than I’ve ever been pushed.”
And that pushing shows no sign of stopping.
•••
RAMP’s next public hearing will be virtual, and is scheduled for 10am-noon Tuesday, May 21, 2024. Meeting details will be made available on the Whale Safe Fisheries page of the CDFW.
Any interested person, or his or her authorized representative, may submit written comments on the proposed action to the Department. Those must be received by the Department via mail, or e-mail, no later than May 21 at Regulations@wildlife.ca.gov or:
California Department of Fish and Wildlife
Regulations Unit
Attn: Chelle Temple-King
P.O. Box 944209
Sacramento, CA
94244-2090