Crab season could get crowded

Commercial crab season will begin Dec. 1 as usual, but it may be a bit crowded out there.

Young doesn’t think this will reduce the competition for local crab however.

“There will be plenty of gear in the water,” he said.

Crabs that are caught should be nice and plump, local experts said after samples taken Thursday showed the North Coast’s average ratio of meat to shell to be 25 percent, the amount required to open the season.

“We still have two more weeks for them to fatten up,” said Pete Kalvass, California Department of Fish and Game’s senior marine biologist and resident expert on Dungeness crab. “They’ve already reached their required ratio; we don’t have to project to the season opener.”

According to Kalvass, while some locations along the North Coast had less than the required ratio, and others had more, Crescent City was on the high end of the scale.

And that isn’t the only good news.

Local sport crabbers have been seeing bumper crop numbers in their pots since the season opened Nov 7.

That could be promising for next year’s commercial crab fishing, because the smaller crabs that the recreational fishery is allowed to pull are a predictor of what next year’s commercial season could look like, Kalvass said.

Crescent City resident Tom Campbell, who was out with friends off South Beach on Sunday, was impressed with the size and fullness of the crabs they caught.

“We all landed our limit,” Campbell said. “They looked real good.”

The limit for recreational crabbing is 10 per person.

Unfortunately, good news for next year doesn’t put meat on the table this year, and Kalvass is worried that the North Coast crabbing fleet is going to have to tighten its belt yet again.

 “It’s really hard to predict what the season will actually look like,” said Kalvass who has studied the harvest rates going back to the early 1900s. “But based upon preliminary indications it’s not going to be a good season. The problem is that its cyclic, and we are in a down turn.”

In the last decade, the crab harvest has fluctuated dramatically.

The bumper years occurred in the middle of the decade, Kalvass said, with the California crab fleet harvesting nearly 20 million pounds each year from 2003 to 2006, compared to 3.6 million in 2001-2002 and barely 5 million last year. 

But Kalvass is confident that the cycle will be back on the upswing in coming years, and if this year’s recreational crab season  is any indicator, it may be sooner than later.

“There’s a pulse coming,” said Kalvass. “It bodes well for next year and the year after.”