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Ice-free crab season almost complete

June 15th 5:29 pm | Jim Paulin Print this article   Email this article   Create a Shortlink for this article

With receding sea ice fully opening the snow crab fishing grounds, it's likely that a little extra time was all that fishermen needed to catch all the quota, even with some problems with forbidden females.

Bering Sea opilio snow crab fishermen were on track early in the week to finally catch the entire quota by Friday's extended deadline, according to shellfish biologist Heather Fitch of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Unalaska.

"It's going awesome," she said Monday, with only 2 million pounds remaining from an 88.9 million pound quota.

The previous week, ending Saturday, was highly productive, with 7.1 million pounds harvested, Fitch said.

More than half the 72 boats had finished fishing, while 34 were still picking pots, she reported.

"A lot of boats are checking out each day. It's really tapering down," Fitch said.

Normally, the opilio snow crab season is over by March or April, she said.

But this year was very different because of ice covering the fishing grounds for much of the season, denying fishermen access to the little 1.2 pound-average opies.

The entire fishery was set to close on May 31, but on May 14, Fish and Game gave fishermen a couple of extra weeks, until June 15.

"Record sea ice significantly reduced available fishing grounds throughout a large portion of the Bering Sea snow crab season. Extensive ice coverage has persisted into mid-May resulting in 23 percent of the snow crab total allowable catch unharvested. The 72-hour delivery requirement is waived for the remainder of the 2011/12 season," according to the ADF&G press release.

Fishing started greatly improving in late May, ADF&G biologist Britta Baechler said last week. That's when the CPUE or catch per unit of effort, which records the number of crab per pot soared to 330 opies up from 190 the week before.

"The CPUE just went through the roof," she said. "It's a happy ending to an incredibly long, drawn out season," Baechler added.

The extension may have pushed the season into crab mating season, because last week numerous boats were fined for landing illegal female crabs. Only male crabs can be legally harvested, and the two sexes don't usually mingle outside of mating season. The rules require females to be pitched back into the ocean, if caught in a crab pot. But in their haste to catch all their quota, over-excited fishermen may not have been not paying close attention to crustacean gender distinctions.

Fitch said she's surprised that mating season would have already started, considering the continuing low temperatures. But she said crabbers were getting better at avoiding the females, and sometimes just moving a short distance away would eliminate the problem, she said.

The extended season, however, is likely to produce valuable biological data on the movements of the females, seasonal information unavailable in a normal year when the fishery closes two months earlier, Fitch observed.

With the ice surrounding the Pribilof Islands processing hub of St. Paul earlier in the season, the group representing most of the snow crab quota ownership requested an extension of the season, as a precautionary measure.

Jake Jacobson, executive director of the Inter Cooperative Exchange Super Cooperative in Seattle, said an extension was needed for his group, representing about 75 percent of the opie quota., because of the ice nightmare.

"The ice has just been terrible," Jacobson said in February.

The tug Redoubt, from Homer, was hired through a partnership of ICE and Trident Seafoods, with each paying half the cost, Jacobson said. The tug not only performed ice breaking and docking assistance to boats in the harbor, it also helped boats navigate around ice floes five miles from the St. Paul harbor entrance, said Trident official Paul Padgett.

The ice closed St. Pau harbor, and consequently, crab processing at Trident's plant. Some of the plant's 400 employees were temporarily redispatched to the Trident plants in Akutan and Sand Point, where processing continued.

Jacobson said the final price paid to crabbers won't be determined until later, after the season and based on sales results. The $1.88 a pound posted by Unisea was only a tentative "go fishing" price. Last year's final price was $2.41 per pound of snow crab, he said.

Jim Paulin can be reached at jpaulin@reportalaska.com

 

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