Bodega Bay geared up for crab season this week with crews loading hundreds of crab traps on boats in anticipation of opening day this Friday (Nov. 15).
“Oh yeah, it’s been nuts around here,” said a clerk at Diekmann’s Bay Store across the water from Spud Point Marina where on Veterans Day boats piled high with crab traps waited to head out to sea Thursday morning when they can begin to set their traps.
At the Paisano Brothers dock on Westshore Road Rich Franceschi helped workers load traps and said the commercial Dungeness crab season was good to go on Friday unless bad weather set in.
“As far as I know, it’s on,” said Franceschi, unlike last year’s delayed season opener that was pushed back six weeks due to late molting. Previous seasons have also been stalled by price haggling between fishermen and wholesale buyers.
Fishermen are expecting to get $3 a pound for their catch this year, about the same as last year, said Franceschi. Preliminary reports indicate a high-quality catch. “The quality is good,” said Franceschi. “Good size.”
At Big John’s Market in Healdsburg they’re agreeing it’s going to be a good crab season but as of Tuesday morning it wasn’t clear when they’d have local Dungeness for sale.
“As it stand right now it’s kind of up in the air,” said Mitch in the meat department, where they’re still awaiting word from wholesalers when the season’s catch would start coming in.
The state Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) also forecast a strong Dungeness crab harvest for 2013-14. “Crab populations appear to be strong coming off another record-setting year in the commercial fishery,” said California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Senior Environmental Scientist Pete Kalvass, in a media report. “However, crab in local areas of Northern California above Cape Mendocino may be somewhat underweight for the first few weeks of the season due to a late molt.”
Crabbers can set their traps starting Thursday but retail grocers probably won’t have fresh local crabs until the weekend. “I would say probably Sunday or Monday,” said Franceschi at Paisano Brothers, where they hope to have live crabs on sale at their Westshore Road outdoor stand by this weekend. “Hopefully there will be some over there for Saturday,” said Franceschi.
The California Dungeness crab harvest is coming off two bumper crops, with more than 15 million pounds of crab harvested last year in the “Central Management Area” south of the Mendocino-Sonoma County line. For the whole state the catch totaled nearly 32 million pounds, an all-time record since season statistics began to be recorded in 1915.
The 10-year average season catch is a little more than 7 million pounds for the Central Management Area and 18 million for the whole coast, according to CFW. Two years ago an all-time catch was reported for the Central Dungeness harvest, with more than 19 million pounds brought in south of the Mendocino-Sonoma County line.
A good-sized Dungeness weighs two-and-a-half or sometimes three pounds. The Dungeness crab population is cyclical, depending on environmental factors ranging from ocean temperature to pollution, wind and currents.
The two recent strong crab seasons occurred just as new state legislation was in the works to limit the number of crab traps a commercial boat can set. State Senator Noreen Evans introduced the law to rein in what had become the commercial crab industry’s annual “race for crab,” in which large commercial boats with hundreds of traps swooped down from Oregon and Washington early in the season and took most of the harvest. This crab race was dangerous, depleted the supply and left smaller local crabbers with empty traps and not much of a crab season after the big boats left, said Evans, whose bill was signed into law two years ago by Governor Jerry Brown.
