Crab game price4/1/2023 ![]() Those dates occur at the same time that halibut, sablefish and herring fisheries will be underway, and the busy Southeast troll fishery for winter king salmon is wrapping up. 4-15 in Ketchikan, where it planned to address 157 Southeast and Yakutat fish and shellfish proposals, and move it to March 10-22 at the Egan Center in Anchorage. Increasing COVID rates caused the board to postpone its meeting set for Jan. More Fish Board juggling – The state Board of Fisheries meetings are not only dealing with COVID derailments, but also with conflicts from fishery openers. ![]() The crab association also plans to try and market the catch as Kodiak Tanner crab highlighting the facts that it is bigger than Tanners from other Alaska regions and caught by local fishermen. It’s the future of the resource.” Nichols added.Īll pots in Alaska also are required to use twine that is biodegradable to allow crabs to escape in the event of lost gear. Cleaner fishing is better for everyone and those escaped crab are for the next few years of fishing. Whereas if you only pull it once a day, potentially crab have up to 24 hours to find one of those rings and get out of the pot. “If you’re turning the pots twice a day, you’re not really giving the crab enough time to filter out of the escape mechanisms. ![]() “If you have a pot with web that’s really big mesh, a lot of that small crab is going to walk right through and you’ll end up with a pot that’s a lot cleaner.”Īnother factor is how long the pots are soaked. So that pot is likely to have quite a bit of juvenile and female crab in it,” Nichols explained. “If you have a groundfish pot that’s converted to a Tanner pot and it’s got small, 3-inch web or something like that, the only way for nontarget crab to get out is to find one of the four escape rings. ![]() The webbing in the pots also will add to the workload. “There will be a lot of sorting and if a pot has 30 or 40 legal male keepers in it, it may have 300 or 400 sublegal males and females mixed in there.” “Those are next year’s crabs and we want to handle them carefully and get them back in the water,” he said. Nichols said the opener could be as short as three days or it might last about a week.Ĭrabbers can expect a lot of measuring, he said, adding that a large group of crab are going to be “just short of the stick this year.” A total of 85 boats were signed up for the fishery at Kodiak, 47 at the South Peninsula and 14 at Chignik. So you can kind of think of this as the front edge,” Nichols said.įishing is expected to go fast depending on three factors: the number of boats, good or scratchy hauls and weather. Once they start to become legal, we can expect them to hang around for potentially three years, and there’ll be more small crab behind them. “A Tanner crab is getting to be legal size around age 4 or 5, and then they start to die of natural causes or age out of the population by around 7 or 8. It appears to be two big year classes with a broad range of sizes that could support several years of fishing, said Nat Nichols, area manager for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game at Kodiak. Local biologists have been tracking one of the largest cohorts of Tanners ever seen since 2018 throughout the westward region. ![]() The legal crabs weigh over 2 pounds on average. No Tanner fishery occurred in 2021 as crabbers waited for more mature male crabs to grow into the fishery, the only ones that can be retained for sale. It’s simply bad business to go fishing without a price,” said Peter Longrich, secretary of the 74 member Kodiak Crab Alliance Cooperative that negotiated the deal with local processors.Ĭrabbers will drop pots for a combined total of 1.8 million pounds, with 1.1 million pounds earmarked for Kodiak, 500,000 for the South Peninsula and 200,000 at Chignik. “Our strategy was to get a price before the season even started. High crab prices have led all other seafoods during the COVID pandemic as buyers grab all they can to fill demand at buffet tables, restaurants and retail counters around the world. $8.10 per pound! That’s the jaw-dropping advance price being paid to Kodiak fishermen for Tanner crab in the fishery that opened Jan. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |