Crab Update 2025: Highs, Lows, Curveballs, and Silver Linings
Photo by Mark C Anderson
By Mark C Anderson, February 3, 2024
A seemingly glorious scene unfolded at K Dock in Monterey Harbor earlier this month.
Longtime local fishermen Mike Ricketts and Joe Lucido trundled ashore, their traps crawling with Dungeness crab pulled from Monterey Bay that morning.
Locals lined up to meet them, cash or Venmo payment at the ready ($10/pound), many hoping to buy as much as they could.
Fresh, local, direct from boat to buyer.
It doesn’t get much better than that.
But a closer look reveals why the moment proved a bit more complicated —and provides a worthy reflection of the Monterey Bay crab season to date.
The key detail: There just wasn’t nearly as much catch as both crabber and crab lovers would’ve liked.
Lucido estimates they landed half of last year’s typical haul, tops.
Ricketts marvels at the dip.
“There’s just no production, no crab coming in, all up and down the coast,” he says. “Crab has always been cyclical, but there has never been this much of a change from one year to another.”
Other stakeholders caution against labeling it too stunning. Those include California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Senior Environmental Scientist Ryan Bartling, who points to wide variability over time.
Dungeness crab landings from 1980-2023 back that up, having ranged from 3 million pounds in a year to 30+plus million, while hitting all harvest levels in between. (See Figure 2-3 via the above link for those findings.)
“So [the change is] nothing really surprising when you look at the history of the fishery,” he writes by email. “Some years crab are more abundant, other years they are not. [It’s] really driven by ocean conditions, recruitment and production.”
He further notes that the Department does not conduct formal stock assessments (as it does with other species) because, as the CDFW’s Dungeness Crab Enhanced Status Report lays out, “Dungeness crab recruitment appears disconnected from fishing pressure” (with “recruitment” means new juvenile crab joining the fishery each year. (For information on their life cycle and much more, check out CDFW’s Crab information page).
Veteran crabber Dick Ogg is well familiar with the ebbs and flows of the crab fishery, but he can’t help wondering about the regulatory impact on a famously resilient—and cannabalistic—species.
“Our harvest time has always been November through June, and when you take away the first three-plus months, you’re allowing the big crabs to eat [younger crabs],” he says. “It changes the cycle. This is speculation, but a logical thought would be we shouldn’t see this kind of drop off. You change the harvest process, it’s going to change the resource. We’re affecting nature in unintended ways.”
Real Good Fish co-founder and operator Alan Lovewell observes the limited catch makes it hard for fishermen to justify the expense of heading out at all.
“It’s not good,” he says. “Most guys I know are stacking out…or never set gear. Even recreationally it was a bust.”
The lower yields do come with some good news. The scarcity demands higher price points.
And conditions on the water have been pleasant.
“Thank God the weather has been good, or it would be a lost season,” Ogg says. “I’ll take the weather and less crab.”
From his shop in a corner of Santa Cruz Harbor, Hans Haveman of H&H Fresh Fish sees both sides of the situation.
On one hand, he witnesses eager residents thrilled to pay steep prices for fresh crab he gets direct from neighboring fishermen, with limited markup.
“It’s a locals thing for sure,” he says, and given the super short supply chain, “the higher price is directly supporting the fisherman.”
On the other hand, he experiences the uneasy feeling that those pining for the old days are wasting their energy.
“Crab season is never going to be the same,” he says, ticking off constraining variables that are both major and more minor—but no less persistent.
From the major constraint column: desperation from canceled salmon seasons, all-time high humpback populations shortening the season, and dramatic gear restrictions (fishermen were only allowed to use half their gear at this year’s opener).
From the less-major-but-still-crucial category: rising costs for fuel, equipment and manpower and receding infrastructure on land.
“With a season being cut by months, and guys are already fishing with half of [previously] allowed gear, the price of fuel and labor and other factors, combined with no salmon fishing,” he says, “that is going to be a death blow for many [small boat] fishermen.”
So welcome to crab season reality, version 2025, and going forward.
There are a few final things to celebrate:
1. Local CSFs like the aforementioned Real Good Fish and H&H Fresh Fish, as well as Ocean2Table, streamline direct access to available Monterey Bay crab, as does the relatively new wholesale-to-public Sea Harvest Market in Moss Landing.
2. Another direct-to-consumer sale at K Dock lands 10am Saturday, Feb. 8, in time for the following afternoon’s Superbowl. (Bring your cooler!)
You can sign up for email alerts for off the boat sales at the K Dock in Monterey on the City of Monterey’s Marina website (scroll down to “Subscribe to Harbor News Delivered to Your Email”).
Lucido will be there, comforted by the fact that the pierside commerce is better than nothing.
“Without salmon, and with the late start, missing the holiday and its big crab run, anything helps,” he says. “We’re getting by, and that’s the most important thing.”