Quick Take
After four postponements due to the presence of humpback whales, the commercial Dungeness crab season will open statewide on Jan. 18. Crab fishers must reduce their traps by 50% in an effort to reduce lost crab gear.
After months of delay and four postponements, the commercial Dungeness crab season will open in Santa Cruz County on Jan. 18 with some restrictions, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Thursday.
The recreational crab trap restriction in Zones 3 and 4, which includes the area from the Sonoma County line to Lopez Point in Monterey County, will be lifted as well. Santa Cruz County is in Zone 4.
In late October, state officials pushed back the opening of Dungeness crab season from Nov. 15 to Dec. 1. The opening was delayed again in mid-November, followed by a third postponement on Dec. 8. On Dec. 21, it was delayed a fourth time. The fishing season opened north of Sonoma County on Jan. 5.
This is the sixth year in a row that the season opener has been delayed in order to protect humpback whales, which migrate off the coast of California to breeding grounds off the coast of Mexico and Central America in the fall.
The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration reports that 27 whales were entangled in fishing gear off the West Coast in 2023. An endangered leatherback sea turtle was found dead in November off of the Farallon Islands after becoming entangled in crab fishing gear from a previous season.
“California’s Dungeness crab fishery is in a state of crisis due to wildlife entanglements and its future is on the line,” said Geoff Shester, a spokesperson for Oceana, an ocean advocacy organization, in a media release. “Sadly, this popular and economically important fishery has injured and killed endangered humpback whales at an unsustainable rate that may impede recovery of the species.”
To start the season, commercial fishers must reduce their crab traps by 50% in Zones 3 through 6, including Santa Cruz County. That means that crab fishers are allowed to drop half of the pots that they are permitted to carry, with a 64-hour “pre-soak” beginning Monday, Jan. 15, at 8 a.m. During the pre-soak, fishers can drop their pots to catch the bottom-feeding Dungeness crabs, but are not allowed to pull up the traps until Jan. 18 at 12:01 a.m. There are no gear limitations in Zones 1 and 2 in Northern California.
By reducing the amount of crab gear in the water by half, the industry hopes to reduce the risk of entanglement by humpback whales and other sea life. Whale entanglements have increased in recent years, and are often fatal.
“It’s about the minimum we can survive on viably,” said Tim Obert, a Santa Cruz native who has fished commercially for more than two decades. Obert serves as president of the Santa Cruz Commercial Fishermen’s Association and sits on the state’s Dungeness Crab Task Force.
The industry successfully negotiated the 50% gear reduction down from the 70% originally proposed by CDFW, based on a low number of whales off the coast. A recent flyover noted four whales north of Zone 3, which is north of Half Moon Bay to Point Arena, and no whales in Zone 4.
“Right now there is no risk of whales,” Obert said. “We have out-of-season entanglements where we need to work on cleaning up more gear in the ocean.”
CDFW Director Charlton H. Bonham noted in a media release that it’s been an “extremely challenging year” for the state’s commercial fishing industry. “Today’s action … strikes a balance,” he said. “It protects whales and turtles, and it gets people on the water allowing our hardworking commercial fishing fleet to provide fresh sustainable crab to California residents.”
Obert said he hopes that getting boats out on the water will actually reduce entanglements, because fishers can collect abandoned crab gear in the water – something they have been unable to do over the past year because of a reduced Dungeness crab season and the cancellation of the salmon season.
“The thought was, if you have less gear in the ocean, you might have less pots lost at the end. We’d like to strategize how we can improve our gear recovery programs in an effort to decrease those out of season entanglements,” said Obert. He said he’d also like to see restrictions on gear retrieval improved so it’s easier for fishers to retrieve lost pots.
“If a charter boat fishing out of San Francisco, for example, finds a lost commercial crab pot, they can’t legally pick that up,” Obert said. “We don’t want that. We think that it should be open and we should be allowed to clean up the ocean anytime we want.”
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