Not much hope for a commercial crab season
For the second winter in a row crab fishing prospects in the Norton Sound Region look bleak. The commercial season start date is February 1 but the lack of legal size male Red King crab makes it unlikely there will be many fishing. NSEDC has announced it will not be buying crab.
“We’re in the downward spiral but now we’re coming back up,” said Jim Menard of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “That was forecast that it was coming down. Now it’s starting to come back.” The trawl surveys, which are done every August, gather the data used to determine the status of the crab stocks.
“They can see about three or four years into the future with the trawl surveys and so forth but there are several confounding factors,” said retired fish biologist Charlie Lean. “Currently there are very few legal size crab available. So, the advisory committee and the Regional Advisory Council, the federal equivalent of the state advisory committee, have both opposed a commercial fishery. As a consequence the NSEDC board heard our concerns and agreed that they would not buy crab this winter for the second year in a row due to inadequate numbers of marketable, legal crab.”
“The legal male crab were at a low point last year, not the crab,” added Lean. “There were a bunch of females, and still are quite a few sublegal males.”
“Right now it’s just subsistence,” said Menard. “Last year we had just a few who signed up to be catcherseller.”
Charlie Lean explained that nobody will be going out to catch crab for two reasons. First, only one in five crabs in a pot would be legal to sell. That is the current ratio of legal crab to ones which aren’t legal. When the seafood plants are buying they don’t want to buy the small legals. They want five-inch crab. So that means that they won’t be buying approximately half an age class. A fisherman looking to find five-inch crab in his pots will be finding only one crab in ten to be legal. “It’s economically inefficient,” said Lean. “It’s also biologically really stupid. Because in the winter nearly all the crab that are handled eventually die after being returned to the water. The reason is that they freeze. The dead loss in the winter commercial fishery is terrible. In the subsistence fishery people keep smaller crab and it’s legal. So the dead loss is minimal.”
Secondly, the sea ice so far this winter is rough and unstable, according to Lean. It’s easy to lose pots.
Big crab are important in the subsistence fishery also. Historically the subsistence fishery takes about one percent of the harvestable crab.
People are catching tomcods and Dolly Varden, “They catch Dollies through the ice,” said Lean. A popular spot is on the Nome River about half a mile up from the Fort Davis Bridge. “Almost any day you can find people fishing there.”
Commercial fisherman Adem Boeckman reports there’s plenty of talk going on but not much fishing. “There’s talk on whether or not the crab stocks have rebounded enough to have an effective fishery.”
What are the fishermen doing? “They’re going broke,” said Boeckman. “it’s really hard times, especially with the salmon crashing. Some of the fishermen were able to make a little up with salmon the summer before last. But last summer the salmon fishery was a disaster also.”