By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
NEWPORT – A buzz of excitement electrified Newport docks Saturday as the first of the small crab boats arrived to unload their catch under perfect December weather.
Crews with Pacific Living Seafood positioned totes, shoveled ice and hoisted crab from boat-holds to the dock where forklifts scurried to fill box trucks bound for live markets.
“We just fill the trucks and they go to China or wherever,” said Lilli Gustafson, office manager of Pacific Living Seafood. “It’s exciting.”
Sleep will come in snatches for days to come as Saturday marked the first day Dungeness crab fishermen, who had been soaking their pots since Dec. 13, could begin to deliver their catch to kick off the 2023-24 season.
“It was a great catch,” said skipper Andy Betnar as his crew plucked crabs from the hold of the F/V Pursuit. “We’re just a small boat so we’re the first ones back because we can’t hold that much. But we were able to get 3,000 pounds out of 55 pots.”
“Ow!” yelled one of the crew as he lifted an orange-gloved hand with a finger firmly pinched between a crab’s claw.
“He’s been pinched a lot on this trip,” Betnar said with a grin. “We had about a 30 crab-a-pot average and that’s really, really good for that opener. We’re very happy with our catch. And the ocean was beautiful, you just couldn’t ask for anything better. Sunshine and warm temperatures. Everything was perfect, it was just a dream trip.”
The Pursuit, which has a 300-pot permit, headed back to sea as soon as they finished unloading. It and others who are selling to the live market, are getting an opening price of $3.10 a pound from Pacific Living, which is a seafood broker.
“I heard there was a bonus for first boat,” Betnar joked before climbing back aboard the Pursuit as the last of the crab were placed on the dock.
“They will just grab bait and go,” Gustafson said. “Most everyone will be in today so we’ll have about 20 boats to service.”
The big processors like Pacific Seafood and Bornstein Seafood could not agree on a price-per-pound with fisherman during state-sponsored negotiations that ended Dec. 11 after a day-and-a-half. Others like Living Pacific, Seawater Seafood, Hallmark Fisheries and Fathoms agreed to prices ranging from $3 to $3.10 per pound.
There are currently 421 Oregon Dungeness crab permits, according to ODFW, with an average of 320 permits that land crab in Oregon ports annually. Each boat has different pot limits in its arsenal. There are 90 boats with 200 pots each, 175 with 300 pots and 156 with 500 pots.
This year’s Dungeness season was delayed along the Oregon coast from its penciled in annual start date Dec. 1 to allow crab to fatten in certain areas. It was then decided to split the opener with the season beginning Dec. 16 from Cape Foulweather south to the California border, while remaining closed from Depoe Bay north to the Washington border until at least Jan. 1 to allow crabs in some of those areas to continue to gain meat weight.
Results from the third-round of meat recovery north of Cape Foulweather were posted Monday by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which regulates the state’s shellfish industry. Tests showed that crab in areas north of Newport, which were light of meat in the second round of testing, are now ready, while the Astoria-area along with the Long Beach area of Washington, continue to fall short of the desired threshold.
As a result, ODFW announced Wednesday that commercial crabbing can begin Dec. 31 from Cape Foulweather, just south of Depoe Bay, to Cape Falcon, which is just north of Manzanita.
But the latest testing showed crab meat yield remains too low to open commercial crab fishing from Cape Falcon to the Washington border. The next round of crab meat yield testing will help determine if this area can open Jan. 15, or Feb. 1, in coordination with the state of Washington, the agency said.
ODFW tests crabs out of Oregon’s six major crabbing ports in partnership with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission, and the commercial Dungeness crab industry.
Good first “pulls”
Crab commission executive director Crystal Adams said Monday that the season opener has been “pretty great so far, however not so hot on the second pull.”
While the smaller vessels with say 300-pot permits may have pulled 100 full pots a day over the weekend, for the bigger boats which stay out and pull and then reset all their gear, Adams said, it’s not looking as good on the second pull.
“That’s what I’m hearing from friends of mine still in the processing side,” Adams said. “Of course (their second pull) doesn’t have a three-day soak on it. It’s always a little slower the second go-round because they pull it so quickly, as opposed to coming home and waiting for three days like normal.”
As to the question of pricing, Adams believes a price has been set.
“They did not negotiate a price through the Oregon Department of Agriculture,” Adams said. “And I still have not seen anything from ODA on that negotiation so I can’t put out an official quote on what happened there. They did not come to a conclusion.”
But, she said, prices range from $2.40 to $3.50 “depending on who’s paying.”
Adams said she only has second-hand information on what Pacific Seafood and Bornstein Seafood might be paying.
“So I don’t want to say and it not be correct, but I can tell you the $2.40 is probably one of them,” Adams said, and then laughed. “And the $3.50 is not. I do know that Hallmark (Fisheries) was paying $2 with $1 bonus through the holiday season. And some of the live buyers went between $3 and $3.50.”
• Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
Not a good idea to have imported seafood from China come into the United States, because the local commercial fisherman who do this for a living make less for their seafood that they caught at the docks. Need to stop all seafood imports from China. The fisherman here in Louisiana know and feel the effects everyday with the import of shrimp coming into the United States.