The rain is misting over Woodley Island Marina's Dock B, where the Jenna Lee is moored. Kristen Pinto, in a bright yellow slicker, pulls three Dungeness crabs from the trickling bin on the deck of the adjacent home-built pontoon boat from which the Pinto family sells to the public as Jenna Lee's Seafood."It's been a little slower," she says, lifting a half shrug and noting the strained economy and higher price of crab — $8 per pound — have kept some away. "They're a nice size and all, but it adds up. A nice size crab can be $20."The jump in price from last year has been a boon for crab fishers who've been stuck selling their hard-won catches for less and less over shortened seasons in recent years.Keep reading
At 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 4, commercial fisherman Barry Day is 10 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay, watching the clock. One minute to go until the start of Dungeness crab season.In the pitch black sea, Day’s radiant orange buoys bob with the promise of a payday. In total, he has set out 250 crab traps. Every buoy is attached to a thin rope that stretches 200 feet down to a cylindrical, metal-and-wire pot on the ocean floor. Day spent the previous month readying the pots: inspecting every piece of wire, splicing and joining ropes, repairing rubber wrappings, painting buoys.Each trap costs around $300 all accounted for — $75,000 of gear now at the bottom of the ocean. Insurance for his boat and two deckhands is another $30,000. Then there’s the cost of slip space at the harbor. Thirty percent of sales goes to his crew. These are the numbers crawling in the back of his mind as the seconds tick by.The clock strikes midnight, and the mad dash begins. Day’s crew pulls up a pot, empties it out, throws it back overboard. Repeat. A maritime metronome. Last year, his pots came up full after 10-hour soaks, with maybe 30 crabs in each. This year, Day is lucky if there are six in each pot.“Just one of those seasons,” Day said.One bad crab season didn’t used to worry the fleet, not in an existential way. The Dungeness crab industry — or fishery — brings in more than $50 million in a good year and naturally cycles through good and bad seasons. But this year, the lack of crabs is tacked on to a much bigger problem. Those long, thin ropes that stretch from seafloor to surface have come under scrutiny for entangling endangered and threatened humpback whales. It’s an issue so contentious that in 2017, an environmental nonprofit sued the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, claiming it had failed to adequately protect the whales.For the last six years, the lawsuit and subsequent settlement have squeezed crab season into shorter periods. In 2024, the traditional eight-month season opened on Jan. 15 and closed less than three months later. And it’s not just the length of the season — a 50% reduction in the number of traps allowed out at sea is becoming the new normal.Keep reading
This Sunday, one Humboldt County business will be marking an auspicious occasion. Hog Island Oyster Company, a company that operates approximately 90 acres of oyster nursery, hatchery and farm facilities out of Fairhaven on the Samoa Peninsula, will be featured in Google’s latest campaign — with a commercial to be aired during Super Bowl LIX.“When Google approached us we were like ‘wow, really, Google?’” said John Finger, Hog Island Oyster Co. founder and CEO. “It’s been fun to see how many people have picked up on it … It makes us proud. You think about this ad campaign, it’s 50 States, 50 Stories, and for California they chose us.”Hog Island Oyster Company began roughly 40 years ago after Finger, an East Coast native and recent graduate with a degree in marine biology and a background in restaurant work, attempted to marry his love of the ocean and his love of food.So, how did Google get involved?“Part of it is, I think especially in the Bay Area, we’ve been around long enough,” Finger said. “We’ve had one customer call us an institution, and I’m not sure I like that, but he also talked about us being part of the fabric of our community, which is better.”Keep reading
President Joe Biden has banned new offshore oil and gas drilling across a vast swath of federal waters, including the entire coast of California, Oregon and Washington, in a move seen as a last-minute effort to thwart actions by the incoming Trump administration to expand offshore drilling.North Bay politicians and environmental activists expressed gratitude, relief and — in the case of one veteran anti-drilling activist — confidence that it will be extremely difficult for Donald Trump to undo the sweeping new strictures once he takes over the White House in two weeks.The ban, announced Monday, protects nearly 630 million acres in offshore areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska's Northern Bering Sea.To withdraw those areas from future oil and gas leasing, Biden used his authority under a provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act — the same law that previous presidents have used to protect areas of the coast, including President Trump, who sought to safeguard a stretch of the Atlantic coast during his first term.“So we do not believe this can be reversed or undone. I feel entirely comfortable that today’s action is Trump proof,” said Bodega Bay activist Richard Charter, a senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation.In a statement Monday, Biden said his decision “reflects what coastal communities, businesses and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs.”The new orders would not affect large swathes of the Gulf of Mexico, where most U.S. offshore drilling occurs, but it would protect a vast, unbroken stretches of the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines from future drilling.Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, the highest ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, celebrated Biden’s decision to “permanently protect much of our oceans, coastal communities, and local economies from Big Oil’s long record of exploitation.“Importantly, today’s action is Trump-proof; the courts have already defended the 12(a) authority against previous attacks,” Huffman said in a statement, referring to the legal provision used by Biden in the new ban.Read More
A new law requiring all boaters to stay a minimum of 1,000 yards away from endangered southern resident orcas in Washington waters is now in effect.The law aims to protect southern resident orcas from noise caused by boat traffic, which could affect their likelihood of hunting prey such as Chinook salmon. Gov. Jay Inslee signed Senate Bill 5371 in 2023, and the law went into effect Jan. 1.The southern resident population continues to decline — the latest Center for Whale Research census tallied 73.Just last week, a new J pod calf born to mother orca Tahlequah died just days later. Tahlequah is now once again carrying the dead calf, according to researchers, as she did in 2018 in a 17-day, 1,000-mile tour that shocked the region and world.The 1,000-yard requirement had existed for commercial whale-watching boats for most of the year. But before this law, recreational boaters were required to stay only 400 yards from the orcas.Boaters who violate the expanded buffer requirement could receive a $500 fine.The state Department of Fish and Wildlife released a report in 2022 recommending the legislature increase the buffer for all boats to 1,000 yards.“The Department of Fish and Wildlife did a review of the latest science and found that the current 300 or 400 yards is not enough to minimize those impacts on their foraging,” Nora Nickum with the Seattle Aquarium, who helped draft the bill, said in 2023.The report summarized the existing research, including a study that revealed boats within 1,640 yards, “even those operating at just 1-2 knots,” affected the southern residents’ hunting success.Two-thirds of southern resident pregnancies end in loss because of a lack of food. Chinook salmon, their prey of choice, face human-made barriers, pollutants and hungry seals and sea lions.Keep Reading
