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
