Advocates say refined rope-less crab gear showing promise

Manufacturers and some crabbers say technology added to the humble crab pots all but eliminates conflicts with migrating whales, enabling longer crabbing seasons.

photo credit: Marc Albert/KRCB
Traditional crab pots in Bodega Bay. Rope-less gear uses the same traps,
with electronics enabling them to receive a signal from the surface, then release a buoy and rope.

It's said like farmers, those who fish are eternal optimists. But with warm water blobs disrupting habitats, salmon vanishing and ever more regulation, that optimism can be hard to maintain.

That likely holds for California's Dungeness crab fleet, and those operating it. Seasons have been cut short in recent years---not because of low numbers, but due to the danger buoys and ropes hanging down from the ocean's surface to crab pots on the sea floor present to endangered whales.

When first rolled out, there was quite a bit of skepticism about experimental pop-up crab gear as too complicated, too technical and too expensive.

Instead of vertical ropes hanging down the water column, these new crab pots have self-contained mechanisms that launch to the surface on demand, letting crabbers collect them.

No hanging ropes, no entanglements.

But perhaps for a tradition-bound industry, being told to adopt new methods is a tall order.

"No one likes change, but we have to, we don't have a choice," said Steve Melz, who has been fishing commercially since 1986.

At the same time, he takes a 'you can't fight city hall' attitude in reaction to recent changes that have cut short fishing seasons. He says he took part in an earlier trial.

"That, that was a nightmare," Melz said.

Rather than the 40-60 seconds to prepare and cast a pot, he says, each took 10 to 12 minutes. Plus, every one of them had to be lowered and raised individually.

Multiply that by a few hundred pots and there isn't enough time in a day. Melz said the traps also caught fewer crabs.

Plus, there's skepticism about the overall problem. The US National Marine Fisheries Service confirms a total of seven incidents in 2022 of humpbacks in California waters being entangled in ropes attached to Dungeness crap traps. That's out of 16 total confirmed humpback entanglements in state waters that year. No fatalities were confirmed.

But over the years, manufacturers have been refining designs that will sidestep the entanglement issue altogether.

"The cost of the gear has really gone down quite a bit and the manufacturers have worked hard to try and find a cost effective system, said Jeff Shester with Oceana, a conservation group that has pressured federal and state regulators for stricter regulations to prevent whale entanglements. The group that has advocated for rope-less gear.

"The pop up fishing gear keeps all of the ropes and buoys down on the seafloor. They attach up to ten traps together on a string, and only when the fisherman comes back to retrieve the gear, they send a sound signal through the water, the receiver then opens up and the buoys and the rope go up to the surface," Shester said, giving a quick description of how they work.

The ones Melz used during a new trial in the spring, made by San Diego-based Sub Sea Sonics, are both cheaper and faster to work with than earlier prototypes.

"They went ahead and they took that advice, and now we're here," said Melz, saying he is impressed by improvements.

While they are still pricier, In comparing costs, Melz figures in the time and effort needed to remove spring algae growth from floating buoys and the cost of traps lost when buoys get hit by boats, and lines are cut.

"The fact that the buoys are underneath the surface, they don't get any growth on them, they don't get run over. We took out 150 pots and we brought back 150 pots," Melz said.

Shester said this year's test results, involving 19 boats between Bodega Bay and Monterey Bay, are fairly conclusive.

"What the test showed is that the reliability was well above what the criteria are for authorizing this gear from the department of fish and wildlife. The reliability results were 98 percent," Shester said.

This year's tests have also made Melz a believer.

"There's no real huge cost difference in traditional versus the pop up, but with traditional gear, (chuckle) once we're ordered out of the water because the whales are coming back at the beginning of April, we make nothing. If it's about the same cost, and now you're able to fish the rest of April, May and June, seems like it's a hundred percent earning to me,." Melz said.

Shester, is also ready to proclaim success.

"I think we're well beyond the issue of hey, this might not work, it might not be reliable, there may not be these issues because now we have a proven test showing that it does work," Shester said.

By transitioning to new gear, crabbers could see financial pressures of curtailed season ease, while whales migrate in peace and your local fish-monger is cleaning crabs well into the spring

"This is really about restoring the spring season to the coast of California," Shester said.