Like those heady days when salmon are coming in on joyful and full boats, crab season can enliven Noyo Harbor with motion, aromas and noise. And then take it all away, leaving the place silent and with only the faint aroma of the sea. That was the crabby up and downs of the past two weeks.
Unlike the salmon, the gyrations of the crab population are not surprising or signs of doom. Biologists predict choppy cycles in crab numbers, even if they don’t entirely understand the causes of them.
On the Saturday and Sunday after Christmas, both sides of Noyo Harbor were quiet. For the south harbor, the Saturday silence at a sunny high noon was complete. Not just not busy: This was post-Rapture quiet. Caito Fisheries, which had been emitting rich crab smells and working long shifts seven days a week, was motionless — an unplanned Christmas vacation week. Not a soul stirred in the sun on either boat ramp, at the Coast Guard Station or the mooring basin, where all the slots seemed full. Even the delicious aroma of Thanksgiving Coffee was missing, the big new factory and offices quiet.
The culprits? Christmas for one kept people home. The bigger reason was the ocean. Monster rollers had sent rash fishermen back to the docks and kept the better ones at home for a week. Party boat trips were canceled. Tourists were treated to closer-to-shore whale watching expeditions instead of crabbing.
Commercial crab fishermen began delivering again to Caito, enough to get the lines restarted Monday. But most people still seemed to be taking the weekend off, even with a “flat” ocean. California’s most iconic and plentiful crab, Cancer Magister, better known as the Dungeness Crab, got a break from most of the fishing at Christmas.
The first person this reporter found was Tina Rueda, who was “manning” an empty lunch counter at Dolphin Isle Marina, the end of the line in the south harbor.
“Lunch has been dead for the past few days. Nobody is going out. But breakfast is big every day. We had about 25 people for breakfast, which we serve 7 to 11 a.m.”
Dolphin Isle’s park is closed to the temporary recreational vehicles that make up the bulk of the place from Nov. 1 to March 1.
“Everybody is ready for spring and summer to come,” Rueda said.
There was only a tad more going on in the north harbor, mostly those whale watching trips and dinners at the restaurants.
“The ocean conditions were really rough this week, but some people went out this morning,” said John Gebers on the day after Christmas, also at noon. Gebers runs the Noyo Fishing Center.
“It’s already better than last year.”
That wouldn’t be hard to do. The crabs landed in 2013 from Mendocino to the Oregon border were just over 1/3 the catch in the same area in 2012. The year 2011 was a record-setting year, which is bad news for those hoping for good catches in the years that follow.
Starting at the end of the 1950s, the Fort Bragg-Eureka fishery exhibited three 10-11 year “cycles” of production. In these repeating cycles, about six years of good or outstanding landings (a record 25.6 million pounds in 1976-1977) were followed by about four years of poor or extremely poor landings (as low as 350,000 pounds in 1973-1974), according to state reports.
The regularity of the cycles fascinated scientists and even statisticians around the world up through the 1970s. Fishermen finally stopped investing their hopes and dollars in what happened last year. However, the reason for the ups and downs was theorized but never ascertained.
“There seems little doubt that crab populations, with their extremely large (reproduction rates) and extremely vulnerable early larval stages (where crabs swim freely in the ocean), are prone to large natural fluctuations in abundance and that variable oceanographic factors (temperature, wind, currents) have important impacts on survival of year-classes,” said one study by Humboldt State University and the Department of Fish and Game.
Then just when they thought they had it all figured out, from 1982 onward the local crab catch cycles have been much less dramatic and have not been as clearly cyclic. Sometimes a good year was not followed by a bad year. But the annual harvests still present a roller coaster picture on a graph. Following the ups and downs over time, 2014 should be a decent year but not a great one.
Captain Tim Gillespie, owner of All Aboard Adventures, agrees with that assessment. “We will be OK this year,” he said. The Sea Hawk took out 19 people on Sunday, and all got their limit of crab. The party boats, such as the Sea Hawk, those at Noyo Fishing Company and Randy Thornton’s Telstar use pots to catch fish. Gillespie says the only problem so far has been people stealing crabs out of his pots. Like almost everybody else, The Sea Hawk stayed out of the ocean during Christmas week because of the waves.
“I’ve been doing crab for 30 years. It’s always an adventure, especially for kids. We go out and get crabs and cook them. Its fun,” said Gillespie. The party boats will go out crabbing and whale watching from now through July.
Crab fishing is one of the few fisheries where sustainability seems to have been worked out. Fishermen catch as much as 90 percent of the adult males in a given season. But female crabs, which can’t be caught by commercial fishermen, still manage to find mates, studies have shown. Female crabs are smaller than males. Commercial traps must have two 4.25-inch diameter circular openings in them which are big enough for adult females and immature males to escape from, but not full-grown adult male crabs. Recreational fishermen and deck hands can pull up the pots, which are much smaller than commercial fishing pots and don’t allow the females to exit. The recreational fishery gets such a tiny percentage of total crabs caught that it has been shown in studies not to be of consequence. Thus recreational fishers can catch females but not commercial.
San Francisco was the center of Dungeness crab fishing starting in 1848, when the first commercial harvest there was processed — until about 1948, when much larger crab grounds off Fort Bragg and Eureka began to be fished, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. While Central California crab grounds took a serious dip in the 1950s due to pollution and overfishing that never happened in Northern California. Just those regular ups and downs, like the waves themselves. The mostly natural drastic up and down cycles don’t entirely overlap, meaning crab fishermen can travel north or south in especially down years.
By contrast to the crab, salmon and rockfish have been in decline, with causes including development, logging, water diversions and overfishing. When salmon numbers suddenly plummeted to historic lows in the circa 2009 time frame, it caught everybody by surprise and resulted in closing the entire state to salmon fishing. Biologists have made studied forecasts every year of returning salmon numbers, but those numbers have been almost entirely way off. Although salmon numbers have been good in the past two years, the population is by no means considered sustainable and well managed as the Dungeness crab is thought to be at the present.
