Dungeness season starts with a bang

GARIBALDI, Ore. — They haul them out of the boats by the thousands — kicking, writhing masses of buggy eyes and flailing, snapping claws — to dockside and, soon, to consumers awaiting the season’s first Dungeness crabs.

It’s a nine-month season with a hectic start, because 80 percent of the catch typically comes in the first eight weeks.

"It’s a footrace," said Jeff Princehouse, owner of Bay Ocean Seafood in this northern Oregon coastal town. "This is a derby fishery."

Crabbers pull up their round, wire-mesh pots at sea, remove the crabs, rebait and replace the pots and race for the buyers’ docks, unload and head back out to sea.

There are no limits during the first part of the season, so the bulk of marketable crabs are caught quickly.

A delay can cost a boat one of the few bountiful "pulls," or chances to bring up their pots, that they likely will have at the short peak of the season. That can chew a big hole in already fragile profit margins.

In Garibaldi, the Willapa Maid glided up to the Bay Ocean dock in a cold dusk, its decks covered with irate, wiggling crabs. The boat’s dog, Daisa, stepped gingerly among them.

Skipper John Law said he figured they had 7,000 to 8,000 pounds, a good catch but not huge by industry standards.

"We’re not complaining at all. We’re happy campers here," he said through a grin. But he knows the bounty will not last.

He figures the boat can get six to eight good trips. "Then we’ll see it begin to drop off," he said.

The crew already had culled out the female and undersize crabs and tossed them back.

Bay Ocean and other processors quickly cook and cool the crabs, whose succulent, sweet, slightly salty meat is prized in the West and far beyond, and speed them on their way as whole cooked crabs, frozen clusters or fresh or frozen crab meat.

The Dungeness harvest is quirky and somewhat cyclical, although nobody is exactly sure why.

"A reason is the nature of the environment they live in," said Rod Kaiser of the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. "When crabs hatch, the temperature and currents all play a part in mortality and predation."

He said good years tend to be lumped together, but that is not really a predictor.

"We are surprised more often than not," he said.

Last year’s 17.5 million pounds was among the highest on record. Princehouse said that based on a very early look, this year might settle in nearer the 10-year average of 10 million to 12 million pounds. A bad year may bring in only 3 million to 5 million pounds.

Nick Furman, head of the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission, said more will be known later in the season and that while preseason tests indicate a high quality this year, quantity assessments are not made.

Instead of the squabbles over price that often delayed the opening of a season, this year Oregon crabbers and buyers held mediated sessions that settled on a price of $1.55 a pound for two weeks, after which the price can revert to a supply and demand basis, Furman said.

California and Washington prices are settling in the same range.

This year, crabbers also got a "presoak" in which they could put their pots in the water 64 hours ahead of the season but not pull them until a minute after midnight on Dec. 1.

Furman said that made for a more orderly process and gave smaller, slower boats an equal chance of getting their pots into productive waters.

"In past seasons, there wasn’t a presoak, and the price impasse went beyond the opening of the season," he said. "When the gun went off, all hell broke loose."

Weather this year reduced the presoak along much of the coast, which could throw off estimates of how the season will turn out because the pots were in the water for a shorter time before they were first pulled.

The size of the harvest is a vital issue in a depressed coastal area that has lost much of its groundfishing quotas and other sources of fisheries income in recent years.