Hurricane Milton cut a swath of destruction across west and central Florida, bringing with it tornadoes, rain, wind and a massive storm surge and causing tragic losses of life and millions of dollars worth of damage.
It didn’t do the stone crab industry any favors, either.
Oct. 15 marks the annual start of stone crab season in Florida, which runs through May 15, 2025. But in addition to the usual sense of joyful anticipation, there’s a dash of anxiety about how the first weeks of the season will go in the wake of not one but two major hurricanes passing recently through the Gulf of Mexico.
Under normal circumstances, crabbers start putting out stone crab traps Oct. 5 and 6 and then retrieve them on the opening day of the season. With Milton lurking in the Gulf, however, many crabbers decided to either put out only one or two traps or held off entirely until the threat had passed.
What this means is there may be fewer crabs in the traps come Oct. 15, which means fewer crabs available for your dining pleasure.
Chef Michael Schwartz of Michael’s Genuine and Amara at Paraiso, both of which serve the meaty legs with mustard sauce or a green sambal sauce, admits he’s a little concerned.
“I’m worried now for the kickoff of the season,” he said. “Will the storm make it difficult? There’s a lot of inventory on the west coast, and from what I’m hearing from my sources there’s going to be a rocky start to the season.”
Schwartz isn’t alone in his concerns. Wholesaler Rene Cardenas of Hialeah-based The Fish Plug is also waiting to see what happens on Tuesday.
“We won’t know anything until the 15th,” he said. “Then we’re going to know if we’re still good. We’re just waiting to see what happened. This weather is killing us — you can’t go out and check traps in bad weather.”
There’s another concern for crabbing boats, too. Key West native Mario Palazon of FreshCo Fish Market & Grill in Kendall, who has been in the seafood wholesale business for more than 20 years, said that a couple of his crab suppliers reported that their traps weren’t where they left them.
“It’s a disaster,” he said. “Their traps get blown around. So now they have to search for their traps. And water is murky. The bottom of that ocean is nowhere near what it looked like last week. So they’ll try to see where the hurricane blew them, even if they can’t pull them up till the 15th.”
What will make a difference to restaurants in the first week of the season is where they get their stone crabs from, Palazon said. Crabbers who work in the Keys and Everglades City, two of the largest spots nationwide for catching stone crab, will have most of their traps in the Atlantic or far enough south in the Gulf that they weren’t affected.
But Milton will have affected the St. Petersburg and Tampa crabbing grounds, which last year produced a higher average per trap, according to Roger Duarte, CEO of Miami-based George Stone Crab, the largest vertical stone crab operation in North America (he has his own fleet of fishermen and boats and handles his own processing and distribution).
Duarte’s fleet opted to wait until late last week to put out their traps, so he too expects a slow start to the season. But he’s looking on the bright side as much as possible.
“Thank God it came when it did,” he said of Milton. “A week later, we would’ve had to throw our traps out because we could lose them all in the hurricane.”
The storms were “devastating” to the industry on the west coast, said Holly Dudley, one of the directors of the Florida Stone Crabbers Association based in Everglades City (the other directors are Kelly Kirk and Carrie Doxsee). Most of the fleet out of Everglades City limited the number of traps they threw out, so the season may start slowly for them as well.
Still, she knows things could be worse.
“It’s catastrophic north of us, from Lee County to Tyler County,” she said. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen, but these crabbers are resilient, even though they got a late start. It won’t slow them down. They haven’t had a paycheck in six months, and we’ll resume normal operations if these hurricanes would stop hitting us. We’ll catch crabs, but it may not be an abundance.”
If it turns out that there are fewer stone crabs to be had, that shortage could affect the price on the menu. Stone crabs are already expensive because of the limited season, the labor-intensive harvesting and high demand. The market price, generally agreed upon between buyers and fishermen, hasn’t been decided yet, but Palazon said that last year’s prices were $20-$24 a pound for medium (about five to six claws); $25-$32 for large (four to five claws); and $40 for jumbos (three to four claws).
Irene Guerrero of Holy Crab, a Coral Gables-based market that delivers stone crabs nationwide, expects a price increase in light of recent events.
“But that usually always happens at the beginning of a season,” she said, adding that Holy Crab is going to try and maintain its prices from last year.
There is a silver lining to all of this: Joe’s Stone Crab, the king when it comes to this particular crustacean, reports that it’s not worried about its stone crab supply and will be ready to go when it opens on Oct. 17.
And even if the first week or two are rough, everyone agrees the supply will eventually smooth out as the weather grows calmer and that prices generally drop as the season progresses.
Schwartz, whose Michael’s Genuine is about to see its raw bar come alive with cracking claws, says he’ll visit Joe’s a couple of times during the season because it’s “a great experience.” And even without the aftereffects of a hurricane to worry about, he has advice for diners regarding stone crabs.
“Wait for the prices to drop down a little,” he said. “And go somewhere where they don’t mess around with it, where they take a good product and don’t screw it up. You don’t have to make it fancy. Crack it, make a good sauce and serve it fresh.”
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