Alaska Dungeness crab prices are at a record high

Crab fishing in Southeast Alaska is in its fall season, but you won’t find many crab boat captains willing to talk about the details of their business. This season crab boats in Alaska are getting record prices per pound for Dungeness Crab.

Crab fishing is a competitive enterprise. Startup costs can range from tens of thousands of dollars to potentially millions of dollars. Bait is a tightly kept secret, so are favorite places to fish for crab. I caught up with the crew of a crabbing boat that sells to a processor in Juneau, and they agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. The crew is worried that if word got out that crabbing is good in the waters they work, bigger boats might come in and elbow them out.

“A legal Dungeness has to be at least six and a half inches in width, just below the points on it. So this is a gauge. So if it fits anywhere in between these two little bars here. It’s considered too small. So if it’s bigger than this, it’s a keeper. And it also has to be a hard shell. That’s when you pinch their sides. Like their little love handles,” said a deckhand on a crab boat that fishes in the waters of Southeast Alaska.

“Yeah, then you run out to wherever you want to set them. Drop them in, let them sit for… I don’t know that. Everything depends, everybody fishes differently,” said the deckhand.

They might let the pots sit for a day or even a week, though weather often makes that decision for them. He says the first thing he does before they leave the harbor is check the cottons on the pots. The cottons are a safety mechanism of sorts.

“Just in case the pot gets stuck underwater, after a certain amount of days, the cotton will disintegrate. And it will open the lid on the pot so everything inside of it can get out,” said the deckhand.

He’s is geared up in heavy PVC rain gear, this set has a spot for knee pads. A typical crab pot can range from 60-80 pounds and he says he has to use his entire body to push them around, and sometimes they push him around. 

“So this is a sorting table. Yeah, and this is the roller off the side. You push all the pots off the side. When you pick them up, you run the line through the block there. And the block pulls it up off the bottom,” said the deckhand.

The side of the boat we’re standing on is known as the wet side, that’s where the heavy lifting happens. 

“Your responsibilities are to pull the buoy out of the water, hand it to the person running the block, they feed it through the block, and then hand the line back to you, and you coil it on this little bullhorn thing here. so, you have to get really good at coiling rope. The cleaner the coil, the better it’s, or, the easier it’s going to be to throw back into the water,” said the deckhand.

Once the holding tank has enough crabs in it they head to the processor to offload their catch. The deckhand’s job is to get down inside that tank after they pump the water out.

“We’ll drop a, it’s called a Trayco, this big white bin, that yeah, the crane drops down. You load it up with as many crab as you can and they take it up. And that usually has a scale on it, it tells you how much it weighs,” said the deckhand.

Commercial processor prices for Dungeness crab in Alaska are at a record high right now at $4.25/pound. That’s enough incentive to head out into Southeast Alaska waters during the frigid weather that’s sure to be on the way in November.

“We got this nice diesel oil stove in here, yeah it keeps it nice and cozy in here. We have a toilet in here, which is kind of nice. You don’t see that on many fishing boats, usually (you) just use a bucket,” said the deckhand.

When they overnight on the boat the sleeping quarters, though cozy, aren’t exactly spacious.

“It’s a game of inches, especially on the top. You have, you know, four inches from your nose to the top. I hit my head a lot. Permanent bumps on my forehead. You have to sleep like a vampire in a tomb,” said the deckhand.

Questions about types of bait, how many crabs per pot and favorite spots were all met with polite refusals. 

The crew plans to continue working through the end of the fall season which runs from October 1 to December 1.