Anchorage Daily News
January 16, 2005

Last great crab race

Open derbies to be eliminated in favor of catch quotas for each boat

By Wesley Loy

Three days ago, 171 commercial fishing boats tore out of Dutch Harbor and other Bering Sea ports, all bent on catching as many snow crabs as possible before the short season ends.

Among them are the nine boats in Kevin Kaldestad's Seattle fishing company. He hopes they all return riding heavy in the water with crab. But more than that, he's hoping the captains and deckhands he hires to run the boats come back alive.

Ten years ago, one of his boats, the 106-foot Northwest Mariner, capsized in 40-knot winds and 24-foot seas northwest of St. Paul Island, killing all six aboard.

Kaldestad said he believes the competitive pressure of the fishery drove his boat and hundreds more to risk too much that January day, to challenge weather best avoided.

"Absolutely," he said. "I'm in a unique club, losing a vessel with a whole crew. It's a tough club to be in."

Now, he said, crabbers are bracing for a new and hopefully safer approach for one of the nation's deadliest jobs.

A revolution is due to sweep over the Bering Sea crab industry later this year, marking a new era for a hard-core calling that's made millionaires and widows alike over its 40-year history.

Federal fishery managers soon will install a revamped management scheme for the crab fisheries. Out will be the open derbies, where as many as 250 boats compete at sea for a share of the overall catch. In will be a new system of individual catch quotas for each boat -- set amounts each crew will know before it goes to sea.

It means crabbers should no longer feel compelled to fish in bad weather, or through sleepless nights or extreme fatigue, to catch the lucrative shellfish before other boats grab them. Each fisherman will have an exclusive percentage of the available crab to catch at his leisure.

The new system, years in the making, is novel and hotly controversial in some respects.

But Kaldestad and many others in the industry agree that individual quotas may save lives by eliminating some of the frenzy in crabbing. As proof, they point to Alaska's commercial halibut and black cod fisheries, which converted to individual quotas in 1995 and grew considerably safer thereafter.

Fishery managers still must finish regulatory paperwork to launch the new crab management plan by an October target date.

Barring unexpected snags, this year's snow crab fishery, which was set to open at noon Saturday, will be the last great crab race in the Bering Sea.

"This is it. The final one," Kaldestad said. "We're all ready to get it over with safely and move on."

A GRIM SAFETY RECORD

A major reason fishing for king and snow crab is so dangerous is that the shellfish are harvested in winter, when their legs are fullest with succulent meat.

As workplaces go, the deck of a Bering Sea crab boat is a nightmare. Boats heave and dive in rough weather, large waves break over the gunwales, and wooden deck planking often ices over. In fact, so much ice can build up on boats that they become top-heavy and flip over.

In the race for crab, fishermen eschew sleep to launch and haul hundreds of 600-pound steel traps, called pots, that capture the crabs on the sea floor. They're at constant risk of being pulled or knocked overboard with the pots or of mangling a hand in equipment.

From 1991 to 1996 in Alaska's crab fisheries, 61 people died, with most of the fatalities occurring when boats were operating in heavy weather, according to a study from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Many a crabbing tragedy has made headlines in the Seattle area, where most of the fleet is based, as well as in Alaska fishing towns such as Kodiak.

There was the Sugar Bear, an 80-foot boat that lost power and rolled over the same season the Northwest Mariner went down. One dead, five rescued by another fishing boat.

There was the Lin-J, a Kodiak boat that capsized during the snow crab fishery of 1999. Five dead.

There was the Exito, which lost a crew member overboard during the autumn king crab fishery in 2001 when the boat was hit by a wave the crew estimated at 45 feet high.

The list goes on and on.

For the past four seasons, however, the winter snow crab fishery saw no vessels sink and no one die.

Vessel safety experts see several factors behind the improved record: more diligent Coast Guard inspection of vessels at the dock, federal regulations that took hold in the early 1990s requiring safety gear such as survival suits and emergency transmitters that activate when a boat sinks, and a new safety consciousness among crabbers.

Crab vessel owners today are an older, more seasoned group, and that's brought a new attitude, said Leslie Hughes, executive director of the North Pacific Fishing Vessel Owners' Association in Seattle. The nonprofit association offers courses on cold-water survival, vessel stability and other safety issues.

"If you look at the players, many of them were very young when they started. They had no sense of fear. And now they've matured," she said.

Charlie Medlicott, a fishing vessel safety coordinator for the Coast Guard, was in Dutch Harbor last week, helping inspect crab boats before they set sail. He remembered a time only a few years ago when almost nobody would show up for Coast Guard courses such as survival suit training at the high school swimming pool.

"Now it's becoming almost unmanageable," he said.

The Coast Guard in recent years also established a policy of conferring with fishery managers on the weather forecast before opening a crab fishery. If the weather looks too nasty for a safe helicopter rescue at sea -- and there have been many -- the fishery is delayed.

A NEW DAY

But Bering Sea weather can turn anytime, and when the fleet is racing for a piece of a harvest worth tens of millions of dollars, crabbers are reluctant to seek safety in port or even bring their crews in off the decks.

In dollar terms, the Alaska crab fleet has seen better days. Populations of snow crab and the larger, more valuable king crab used to be much larger, and crabbers on the most competitive boats sometimes hauled in a fortune.

This season, crabbers are chasing a snow crab quota of 19.3 million pounds, a far cry from the early 1990s, when harvests exceeded 300 million pounds with dockside payoffs approaching $200 million. Such catches once ranked snow crab among the most valuable of all Alaska commercial fisheries, behind only pollock and salmon.

Still, crabbers this week are shooting for a sizable payoff. The fleet agreed with seafood processors on a dockside price of $1.80 a pound for the snow crab. That means the 171 boats participating in the fishery are competing for a piece of a potential $35 million pie. The fishery is expected to last only a few days.

Many in the industry believe the switch to individual fishing quotas, which crabbers will be able to buy and sell, will not only improve safety but also boost the economics of crabbing by winnowing down the size of the fleet, leaving more crab to go around for those who remain in the business.

Some 300 crabbers hold licenses to enter boats in the annual fisheries, far more than necessary to catch the available crab. The fleet is expected to consolidate, with some crabbers selling their catch rights to other vessel owners.

Already, fewer boats are fishing for snow crab because of last year's $97 million federal buyout of 25 boats. The remaining fleet will repay the money through a tax on their crab landings.

The coming revolution in crab management remains highly controversial in some respects. Not only does it divide the catch among fishermen, it apportions crab deliveries among processing companies. Some fishermen believe this constrains their market for crab, possibly lowering payments at the docks. So far, the U.S. Department of Justice has not said the so-called processor shares violate antitrust law.

The new system also will be painful for vessel captains and deckhands whose jobs evaporate as the fleet shrinks.

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, pushed through the legislation necessary to reform the crab fisheries. He said he believes improved safety makes the effort worthwhile.

"The crab industry is probably the worst in the country as far as fatalities are concerned," Stevens said in an interview in 2003. "I had a son who was out there for many years, and I really kept track of this industry from the point of view of safety."

Stevens himself used to be part owner in a Bering Sea crab boat, and his son, Ben, a state senator from Anchorage, once captained a crab boat.

Kaldestad said some crabbers prefer to compete for crab and resisted the change to individual quotas. He calls them "buffalo hunters" whose day has passed.

Crab fishing will always be dangerous in the tempestuous Bering Sea, no matter how the fishery is organized. But at least crabbers will be able to make smarter choices on when and where to fish, Kaldestad said.

"This is going to help. It's not going to calm the ocean or make the crab come on board, but we can choose our window of opportunity, and we won't be racing anymore."

Daily News reporter Wesley Loy can be reached at wloy@adn.com or 257-4590.
Photos by Erik Hill