Will pop-up crab pots save Bodega Bay's crabbing industry?
Will pop-up crab pots save Bodega Bay's crabbing industry?
Deep dive: New ropeless gear mitigates the risk of whale entanglements but crabbers bear the cost
For nearly five years, Dungeness crabbers have watched their incomes diminish by up to 80% as the California Fish and Game Commission mandated seasonal closures, catch limits, and gear restrictions. The situation, as many crabbers attest, has driven many to their breaking points.
“There's people thinking, why even live?” said Tony Anello, fisher and owner of Spud Point Crab Company in Bodega Bay. Much contributes to the financial and emotional strain on the fishing community: the closure of salmon season, shortened and restricted Dungeness crab seasons, devalued boats, gear and permits, and, as existential background noise, the continued menace of climate change portending rising seas, extreme weather and a warming ocean.
Tony Anello and his brother, Steven, both of Bodega Bay, are third-generation fishermen who have fished for over five decades each. Dungeness crabbers, like the Anellos, typically earn the bulk of their income in the first few weeks of the season, now in January. During the spring run, however, they can recoup some of their costs by harvesting crabs. They don’t bring in as many, Anello explained, but they can sell them at higher prices. “The crabs are lucrative in the springtime, and the price is outrageous, the highest it's been,” Anello said in April. When California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) closed the Dungeness season on April 8, as they did the previous year, this revenue disappeared again for crabbers.
Paul Wedel, who lives in Santa Rosa and fishes out of Bodega Bay, began fishing summers as a high schooler with his father and grandfather — who fished commercially since about the ‘40s. Wedel bought his first crab gear in 1988. Back then, he says, the haul was pretty good. “You'd have good years and bad years,” he said. But, overall, the supply of crab has really held up.
Dungeness crab populations do fluctuate from season to season, but, overall, the population has remained steady. The problem for crabbers isn’t crabs. It’s whales.
Longline crab pots snare whales
In 2023, 27 whales were reported entangled off the coast of Washington, Oregon and California, or in other countries with gear that came from the U.S. West Coast commercial fisheries, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Eighteen (12 humpback and six gray whales) were roped by longlines off the coast of California. Of the 27 entanglements, ten were confirmed Dungeness crab pot longlines.
While these numbers are significantly lower than the large number of whale entanglements from 2015 and 2016 that precipitated legislation to regulate the Dungeness crab fishery, they are consistently higher than the numbers from early 2000s. In 2020, researchers demonstrated that the 2015-16 highs were related to shifting feeding and migration patterns driven by excessively warm ocean temperatures, drops in traditional prey and exploding nutrient populations near shore. Climate trends indicate this is a problem that won’t go away.
In 2018, a coalition of conservationists, California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), and commercial crabbers on the Dungeness Crab Task Force began noodling with ideas for experimental gear. Finding crabbers to use the gear has challenged the working group from the beginning. This spring marked the third iteration of ropeless pots and the first year with enough participants to generate data to work with.
Experimenting with “pop-up” pots
While most crabbers out of Bodega Bay docked their boats when the Dungeness fishery closed on April 8, some continued harvesting crabs with Experimental Fishing Permits (EFPs) managed by California Fish and Game Commission. The crabbers used experimental ropeless crab gear commonly known as “pop-up” pots. Unlike traditional gear which strings a long line between the crab pot on the sea floor and the buoy at the water surface, pop-up pots retain the rope in a coil on the pot on the sea floor. When the fishing boat approaches one of its crab pots, a transducer on the boat receives an acoustic signal from the pot. Its “ping” releases the buoy so the crabber can locate the pot to haul it up.
When a handful of crabbers began fishing out of Spud Point Marina on April 9, one day after the official closure, those who were left behind were disgruntled to say the least. The experimental permits are creating strife among the long-standing and close-knit fishing community in Bodega Bay, according to Anello.
“There's a division and it's not good. Not good for the industry and not good for everybody. Even the ones that are actually doing well in their perspective right now. It's not right because the rest of us are going to suffer behind it,” he said, from his kitchen table overlooking Spud Point Marina.
“And some of us that have been around a long time — we have nothing to do. We can't go. It's just not happy with us [for] those guys to be able to fish.”
It’s not happy for those fishing with experimental permits, either. In addition to ill-will and retaliatory-damaged gear, crabbers using EFPs face complicated paperwork, long waits for permits and expensive new gear. The transition to new gear is difficult, say crabbers using EFPs. Many don’t want to talk about it, describing the topic as “touchy.”
Khevin Mellegers who fishes out of Half Moon Bay, first thought, “No way.” The gear was extremely expensive — think $5000 for the ropeless crab pot system. Crabbing is a fairly low-cost industry, Mellegers explained. While the public may pay a high price-per-pound for Dungeness, “We really don't get paid a whole lot for them, which is kind of unfortunate. So it's not like we're mining diamonds with the (pots),” Mellegers said.
The price per pot came down through each iteration developed by Sub Sea Sonics and Guardian Ropeless Systems. In 2022, when the price got closer to $100 per pot, Mellegers signed on.
But then he got cold feet. Many members of the fishing community voiced their anger and frustration over the select few testing the experimental gear after the season’s official closure. The complaints ranged from the injustice that small operations had to bear the brunt of the costs for whale entanglements that they saw as primarily caused by large industry vessels, to concerns about the gear’s potential dangers.
“Oh, boy, were fires getting started,” Mellegers said about that period. “I got scared. I was like, ‘There's no way I'm sticking my neck out right now,’ because it was really volatile. It was a really volatile situation to put myself in within the fleet.”
In 2023 Mellegers used the ropeless gear for the first time. “And I was amazed at how straightforward it was,” he said. “I've done it for two years now with the acoustic releases, and I have not had a single one of them fail.”
“It saved me,” said Mellegers who was emotionally drained from all the season closures and on the brink of leaving the industry altogether.
Now, he can joke about navigating the community’s high emotions while trialing the gear. The hardest part of using the experimental gear was “sneaking by everybody to put (stuff) on my boat. I felt like Casper the Ghost,” he said.
“You got to want to really crab bad to do this”
Stephen Melz, who fishes from Half Moon Bay, has participated in the experimental fishing program since 2022. He’s used several prototypes, from single-pot pop-up lines with buoys attached (a no-go, according to Melz, because it was too slow and the pop-up buoy vibrated the pot, which crabs didn’t like) to the current system, which is a “sled” of ten pots attached to one pop-up buoy.
But adopting the new gear wasn’t intuitive for Melz or other crabbers. “It was horrible,” Melz said about his first day with the new gear. “We did it the wrong way twice.” Challenges ranged from not knowing which way to set the gear out off the boat, or how to attach the pots to toggles which attach to the line, to understanding the technology (a transducer that sends an acoustic ping to indicate the location of the traps). He told a buddy, “Man, you got to want to really crab bad to do this.” Handling that many pots on one line felt dangerous. “On my very first trip out, I was very, very happy that everybody on my crew came back to the dock with all their fingers and toes attached to them,” Melz said.
First-timers in Bodega had success, but keep mum
This spring marks the first year that Bodega Bay crabbers used the pop-up pots, working for EFP holders Craig and Rachel Thomsson of Dandy Fish Company. The Thomssons’ combined experience — they’ve owned and operated a wholesale fish business since 2009 and Craig is a former commercial fisherman — along with a previously approved EFP, made them good candidates for testing experimental gear.
In early July, after the season ended, Thomsson deferred to his crabbers to describe their experiences. Most feared retaliation from within the Bodega Bay fishing community and declined to speak, because the EFPs were “extremely controversial” and they feared “it would fuel the fire.” One, who requested anonymity, said that “the EFP was a success.” But, he added, “There have been a lot of threats that could greatly affect my boat, gear and livelihood.”
The process of getting permits is daunting for crabbers
A general absence of information and lack of communication about how the program works contributed to disharmony among the fleet.
Paul Wedel first heard about the experimental fishing permits about three years ago. The CDFW hadn’t made an official announcement or policy change. Instead, news trickled out to fishers from one to another, first as rumors, then, when they saw vessels heading out after the spring season closure, by sight.
At first, he thought it might be a good idea.
But he never received any official information about the program. And when he went to the CDFW website, he found the onslaught of dense rules and regulations daunting. “When I first thought of it being an experimental permit, I would have never thought it was so many hoops to jump through,” he said.
“We tried to get the correct information out,” said Ryan Bartling, CDFW senior environmental scientist. “We’ve done a couple ad-hoc town halls, and we did hear a lot of anxiety and misinformation being parroted back to us, last summer and in the fall,” he said, about the 2023 meetings.
Navigating the commission’s website for EFPs requires stamina and the application process usually takes about six months. There are no limits to how many EFPs can be approved and it’s intended to be an applicant-driven process. To date, only one application has been rejected because it duplicated previous EFPs.
‘A dangerous way to fish crabs’
Compounding the byzantine application process, Wedel also has concerns about the experimental gear — it’s risky.
So does Luke Sellee, of Fort Bragg, who fishes the California coast from Crescent City on the Oregon border down to San Francisco Bay. Sellee heard about the EFPs by word-of-mouth for the first time in January 2024. “There's no way that's going to work for the fleet,” he said. The competition for space, the potential for gear conflict — tangled lines, cut buoys, bunched up or doubled pots — is too great. The sled, which currently has ten pots attached to it, is too long and cumbersome for crowds of crabbers to navigate. And, if the sled grew longer, as experimenters want, that would only compound the potential for gear conflicts.
Setting gear out — almost in conveyor belt fashion, with the ten heavy pots attached to a long line with toggles — creates a lot of tension. “If someone gets in the bite — it's called the bite when you get in the wrap of the rope and pots are going over the stern — with more pots behind coming down the rope, there's just a big possibility for someone to get hurt during that process,” he said. “It's a really dangerous way to fish crabs, is what it is,” he concluded.
That’s why Melz feared for the fingers of his crew his first day out.
Collecting data on use of experimental gear
Geoff Shester, California Campaign Director and senior scientist for Oceana, has collaborated with commercial fishers and the CDFW on the Dungeness Crab Fishing Gear Working Group since its inception in 2015 to develop solutions to protect whales and the Dungeness fishery. He has examined the data collected from the 2023 and 2024 EFP spring seasons and acknowledges that fishers’ concern for safety is legitimate. But, “right now, we have not heard any actual data or reports of injuries using this gear. (The question of safety) has been looked at, and there is no data suggesting there have been safety issues resulting from this,” he said.
Shester, like many fishermen, didn’t think it would work at first. “I was a skeptic of ropeless gear. I thought it was a science fiction idea that wouldn’t make any sense.”
But he waited it out, like the fishermen, through multiple iterations.
Oceana began gathering data during the extended spring season in 2023 with two vessels. Data collection greatly expanded this year with 19 vessels operating from Moss Landing, Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay, San Francisco and Bodega Bay. Between April 9 and June 23, the trial vessels reported setting a total of 23,048 traps (over 277 trips) — of which, 98.4% were successfully recovered. Forty traps were lost. Since then, ten have been recovered and recovery efforts are still underway. In total, the vessels landed an estimated 229,470 pounds of crab. Put more plainly, the vessels harvested $1.6 million worth of Dungeness crab.
And while the data from this season demonstrate the pop-up pots’ success, Shester envisions continued experimentation with new technology. “Our goal is to see alternative gear, not in just one, but hopefully multiple options, because it may not be one size fits all for every fisherman. Given the diversity of fishing vessels and businesses, we want to see alternative gear options available so that there are ways for fishermen to stay on the water.”
Some may interpret this season’s success as a green light to reopen the entire Dungeness crab season, from mid-November through the end of June to early July. But to those who wonder if this means that all crab fishing should be ropeless gear now, Shester says, “The answer is a resounding no from us.”
The task force intentionally built steps into the process in order to trial gear during the slower and calmer spring season. “The idea is to take an incremental approach and think before we even have a discussion about it in the fall — to really see it work as an authorized solution in the spring.”
“One of the key points of (the EFP)” is to combat the perception of unfairness, that is, that the EFP is only available to some, Shester said. “The goal is to get it authorized so anyone who wants to use it in the springtime during closure can use it if they have a commercial fishing permit.”
Over the next several months, fishermen, advocates, conservationists, scientists and manufacturers will continue to discuss how to resolve these on-going concerns to protect whales and the Dungeness crab fishery. Pop-up pots may lead to a resolution.
Brand Little, a commercial crabber out of San Francisco, has completed two spring seasons with the pop-up pots. “We cannot live on pop-up gear, but we cannot live without it. We just don’t have enough opportunity left. We need both,” he said.
Amy Elisabeth Moore writes about community, climate and the environment in Northern California. She has taught Composition and Literature to students of the Patten College-San Quentin Prison program and to undergraduates, and is currently a journalism student at Santa Rosa Junior College, in the Masters of Science Writing at Johns Hopkins University, and a fellow with CalMatters. This is her first article for Sebastopol Times.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story contained an error about how many of the pop-up crab pots were lost. It said “hundreds.” That was incorrect. This has been altered to read, “In total, 40 traps were lost. Since then, ten have been recovered and recovery efforts are still underway.”
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Great article! Well-written, comprehensive: combines science, economics, and anthropology of the fishing culture and communities. This is worthy of National Geographic! Good to see it in Sebastopol Times. A great catch!
Great article!!! Let's hope the new pots will work! We love Bodega Bay crab! Tlynch