It is a sad tale, and one that does not become easier to take with repetition: once-proud fishermen reduced to poverty by factors outside their control. The good old days with overflowing boats are gone, and fishermen see smaller and smaller returns for every dollar they spend. Their work becomes more dangerous as they feel forced to go out in bad weather to eke out a bare existence.

California’s crabbers are seeing their livelihoods go down the tubes. Why? Are the stocks being depleted, as happened with salmon, sardine, or groundfish? No, that’s not the reason. Dungeness crab remains a robust and commercially valuable species. Just what is the problem?

Rich Young, a crabber since the mid-1970s and second-generation fisherman who fishes out of Crescent City, said he feels “backed into a corner.” His wife works at Del Norte County Social Services, “and these days she sees people from the fleet all the time,” he said. “A big percentage are on food stamps.”

What caused this predicament? If there are still healthy stocks of crab off the Northern California shore, why is the crab fishery in such trouble? The answer isn’t simple. For one thing, intensified competition has turned the crab season, officially seven months long, into a one-month fishing derby. Afraid someone else will get there first, fishermen sink ever more effort and money into landing the same number of crabs quickly.

For another, the number of crab buyers has collapsed in recent years. The largest processing company, Pacific Choice Seafoods, has grown so dominant that North Coast crabbers, unable to sell their crabs anywhere else, feel they have little say in the price. Young said that most crabbers realize their situation is untenable in the long run.

The Crab Derby

California’s dungeness crab fishery has been regulated by the same simple system for almost a century. Fishermen are only allowed to keep male crabs with bodies over 6.25 inches wide, and they can’t harvest them when they are molting. These refreshingly straightforward rules have proved adequate to keep the Dungeness population at sustainable levels for over 80 years.

Increased fishing effort hasn’t damaged crab stocks—or so it seems to fisheries biologists, regulators working in this area, and the fishermen themselves. The data needed to say this with certainty, however, are unavailable, mostly because of the broad perception that Dungeness crabs are doing well. Research dollars tend to go to fisheries that are known to be in trouble, not seemingly healthy ones.

“There is no indication that the fishery is not sustainably managed,” said Dave Hankin, a fisheries biologist at Humboldt State University. “The population has always persisted in spite of the intense fishing.” He has been studying Dungeness for 20 years, using the amount of crab landed as a rough guide to population numbers. While the Dungeness population sometimes swings radically from year to year, he said, over the long term it has remained strong.

Right now, 600 vessels are licensed to fish for crab, which they do mostly from Crescent City, Bodega Bay, and Pillar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay. There are no limits on the number of crab pots a vessel carries, or on the time of day when fishing is allowed.

During the past 15 years, as salmon and other fisheries were severely curtailed, crab attracted more attention—even though there wasn’t any more crab to catch. Studies have estimated that up to 90 percent of the legal male crabs in the water were already being caught, and that is assumed to be true today.

With more crabbers going after the same limited stock, the pool of eligible crabs now gets caught much sooner than in past years. In other words, fishermen do not take more crab, they have just compressed the season—which extends from the end of the moulting season in November or December, depending on the region, to June—into little over a month early on. Nowadays, at least 80 percent of a year’s catch is brought to shore in the first six weeks. Patrick Collier, associate marine biologist in the Eureka office of the California Department of Fish and Game, recalls that 30 years ago, when he was a regulator for Fish and Game, the early “gold rush” part of the season lasted “at least a few weeks longer” than it does now.

A fisherman who sees the crab stock being harvested more quickly will of course buy more pots to keep up, beginning a cycle of overcapitalization. “Any crab fisherman will tell you that over the years, more and more gear has been going into the water without more crabs being caught,” Young said.

“It’s true that there’s too much fishing gear out there,” said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “It’s getting to the point where the operation is becoming marginal.”

Again, there are no hard numbers. Collier says Fish and Game keeps track of the number of boats that go out, but not the number of traps—and a 30-foot boat could work as many crab pots as a 100-foot boat if the crabber with the smaller boat were willing to constantly check his gear.

Zack Rotwein, a crab fisherman out of the village of Trinidad in Humboldt County, works 350 crab pots from a boat that is just 30 feet long. At $100 per pot, that’s a $35,000 investment—plus the value of his boat and the $16,000 crab fishing permit.

George Boos, who fishes out of Bodega Bay in a 36-foot boat, has only 50 pots, but says that most fishers in the area have 200–400. Lately they have been competing with vessels up to 100 feet long that each carry 80–100 pots. “The other day I pulled up 15 crabs, and only one was male,” he told a reporter in late March. “Early in the season they’re almost all males.”

The crab derby not only pushes crabbers to invest more capital, it also forces them to take more risks. Early December, when the state’s most lucrative crab grounds open off the coast of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties, is also the time when the most violent storms hit. Each year, fishermen lose their lives in the race for crab.

“I think crab fishing is the most dangerous fishery on the North Coast,” Young said. “People feel pressured to go regardless of the weather, and as fishermen grow poorer over time they spend less money on maintenance. It would be silly to deny the danger there.” It is a danger Young knows personally. His brother died in a fishing accident off Eureka 30 years ago.

“Unless the weather is just death, you gotta go fishing,” observed Rotwein. He too speaks from experience—in the 1980s, he was dumped into the water when the boat he was working on sank.

Even if the weather isn’t rough, the hours are. At the beginning of crab season, Rotwein said, crabbers normally stay up for two days straight, to make sure they catch their share. “While you’re sleeping, someone else is pulling up those crabs. So it gets hard to sleep.”

Big boats with large crews can work around the clock, fishing at night with lights. Small boat crews, no matter how determined, have to sleep sometime. Still, they stay out as long as they can, making a perilous job even more dangerous.

What can be done to help crabbers break out of this bind? A trio of professors is attempting to find some solutions: Hankin and natural resources economist Steve Hackett at Humboldt State University, and human ecology research scientist Chris Dewees at UC Davis. Their study, sponsored by California Sea Grant, examines the possibility of instituting a management system that would spread out the season, letting fishermen reduce the intensity of their operations without losing their share of the catch.

That could have benefits besides making crabbing safer and less costly. “Right now,” Hackett explained, “most crab is caught in a huge pulse in late December and early January.” As the market cannot absorb the supply all at once, most of the catch is frozen. Yet fresh crab brings a higher price on the market than frozen crab, so if the season were spread out, the value of the catch would increase. In addition, consumers would have access to fresh crab for a longer period of time.

In looking for “a management system that generates more net economic value from those crabs that are caught,” Hackett said, they have considered trap limits, which would limit each boat to a certain number of crab pots. Such a plan was implemented in the State of Washington just last year, but it is too soon to judge its efficacy.

Another approach involves individual transferable fishing quotas (ITQs), by which each fisherman is given a share of the catch and can collect it whenever he wants. ITQs have proved controversial because, in some cases, they have led to concentration of the right to fish in a few hands (see “Can ITQs End Overfishing?” Coast & Ocean, Summer 1998). “You’d have to make sure permits don’t fall into the hands of processors,” said Grader. “Often there’s a failure to enforce them, and pretty soon fishermen are sharecroppers.”

Other proposed management approaches include reducing the number of permits (a drop from 600 to 350 would be reasonable, according to Grader), limiting the number of traps (as was done with lobster in Florida and crab in Alaska, Grader pointed out), banning night fishing, limiting the number of trips per boat, and forming a fishermen’s cooperative, as has been done with salmon.

Imposing new regulations on the crab fishery would not, however, be easy. “The crab fishery is difficult to deal with because the participants are far more diverse than in any other fishery,” said Pete Leipzig, executive director of the Fisherman’s Marketing Association, located in Eureka. “There are fishermen with open-hulled skiffs and a couple dozen pots, and there are fishermen with 150-foot boats,” he said. “Coming up with a management scenario that makes everyone happy is probably impossible.”

In addition, fishermen have a deep distrust of government regulation—which is understandable, Hackett said. “So often, regulation comes about after a fishery has suffered some decline and regulators are confronted with having to reduce the amount of effort and harvest in the fishery. That makes it a lot more difficult to make a living.”

Dewees, who specializes in the interplay of biological and human dimensions in fisheries management, added that fishermen tend to guard their independence jealously, much like farmers and others involved in natural resource industries. “In any field where people are independent operators, they value that,” he said. “And there aren’t that many alternative fields that offer that independence.” According to Dewees, “a grassroots solution” would be more effective than regulation “because it would get better compliance. Things that are forced on people are not often well heeded.”

The way Young sees it, however, crab fishermen currently compete so fiercely that it’s absurd to think they could achieve the consensus necessary for self-regulation. “If we were able to reduce the amount of effort at the start and get a situation where people’s survival was not at stake, I think you could get the kind of behavior you need to do a self-regulating plan.”

A little of the needed breathing room might perhaps be provided by reducing the size of the crab fishing fleet, said Young and Zeke Grader. If the government could team up with industry to buy out a portion of the fleet, the remaining crabbers would be less pressed and could perhaps begin to talk about how to replace the derby with a full season. But prospects for that happening, said Young, appear dim.

Only One Big Buyer

California’s crab fishermen are not only being pushed to the margins out on the water, they also face a shrunken market at the dock. “There’s been an enormous consolidation within the past few years. These days, Pacific Choice—we call it No Choice—pretty much controls the coast,” Leipzig said.

Not only does Pacific Choice Seafoods of Eureka now dominate the local market, it also processes some 40 percent of all the crab landed in California. Its parent company is Pacific Seafoods, the nation’s largest vertically integrated seafood buyer and processor, based in Portland, Oregon.

Scores of Pacific Choice’s competitors have gone bankrupt, been absorbed by the company, or both. Eureka Fisheries; Sea Products of Crescent City; Ocean Beauty in Astoria, Oregon; Del Mar Seafood’s Northern California branch—all have fallen by the wayside.

That means that when fishermen bring in their big loads at the beginning of the season, selling to Pacific Choice may be their only option. As a result, Pacific Choice pretty much decides what the price of crab will be. “It’s hard to negotiate with just one buyer,” Young said.

Other companies still exist, but they don’t have adequate facilities to handle the high volume of landings at the beginning of the compressed season. Caito Fisheries of Fort Bragg and Hallmark Fisheries of Charleston, Oregon, for instance, have one processing facility apiece while Pacific Seafood has nine.

“Unfortunately, the market is at a point of consolidation,” said Rick Harris, Pacific Choice’s general manager. “We’ve bought up plants that have asked us to buy them,” he said. “We have made sizeable capital investments to be able to handle the volume,” including the purchase of special nitrogen freezers that chill crab to 120 degrees below zero to keep crabmeat’s quality high.

Some crab fisherman in Eureka, Bodega Bay, and Pillar Point Harbor sell crabs off their boats at the dock, getting twice as much per pound as from Pacific Choice. While that strategy works for small fishermen, it is impractical for large boats or during the most productive time of the season. In December, at the height of the crab derby, a single boat may bring in up to 6,000 pounds. The only processor that can handle that quantity is Pacific Choice.

Hackett points to this as another reason to spread the season—converting more of the market to fresh or even live crab would open the door to buyers who lack the large freezer capacity of Pacific Choice. A hypothetical “fleet of little white vans with live tanks in the back” could ferry fresh-caught crab from Eureka, for instance, to Los Angeles and other hot markets. That would help keep prices up.

“In an ideal competitive market,” Hackett said, “you have a large number of small sellers and buyers.” Buyers in the markets for grains and minerals, for example, pay as much as they can while still making a profit because if they don’t offer top dollar, others will. Although such a situation is rare in the world of fisheries, “as economists, we believe those markets perform better,” said Hackett.

Bill Carvalho, currently the coast’s largest distributor of fresh crab, is skeptical, however. He’s bought crab off the dock at Eureka and shipped it—live—to markets up and down the coast, and even all the way to Shanghai. It’s a great business, he said, but he sees little room for expansion—largely thanks to the business savvy of Pacific Choice, which is unlikely to allow a fleet of white vans to steal its markets. Indeed, as the live and fresh markets expanded in the past few years, he said, Pacific Choice responded by selling more live crab, covering that market as it does the market for frozen crab. Thus fishermen get no price increase by selling to the live market.

Even if it were possible to end Pacific Choice’s hegemony, it isn’t clear that that would solve anything. In fact, slaying the giant could have dire side effects. As Hackett pointed out, Pacific Choice is very important to fishermen, for it buys not only crab but also groundfish and shrimp, and some crabbers also fish for these.

All this helps to explain why the research project won’t be delivering any quick, easy recommendations. The idea behind the study, Hackett said, is to “help participants in the fishery, including processors, assess the situation and find out if change makes sense.” If change is to happen, however, it will be up to the fishermen to bring it about.

Arno Holschuch, a reporter for the North Coast Journal, is currently hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.