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At 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 4, commercial fisherman Barry Day is 10 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay, watching the clock. One minute to go until the start of Dungeness crab season.
In the pitch black sea, Day’s radiant orange buoys bob with the promise of a payday. In total, he has set out 250 crab traps. Every buoy is attached to a thin rope that stretches 200 feet down to a cylindrical, metal-and-wire pot on the ocean floor. Day spent the previous month readying the pots: inspecting every piece of wire, splicing and joining ropes, repairing rubber wrappings, painting buoys.
Each trap costs around $300 all accounted for — $75,000 of gear now at the bottom of the ocean. Insurance for his boat and two deckhands is another $30,000. Then there’s the cost of slip space at the harbor. Thirty percent of sales goes to his crew. These are the numbers crawling in the back of his mind as the seconds tick by.
The clock strikes midnight, and the mad dash begins. Day’s crew pulls up a pot, empties it out, throws it back overboard. Repeat. A maritime metronome. Last year, his pots came up full after 10-hour soaks, with maybe 30 crabs in each. This year, Day is lucky if there are six in each pot.
“Just one of those seasons,” Day said.
One bad crab season didn’t used to worry the fleet, not in an existential way. The Dungeness crab industry — or fishery — brings in more than $50 million in a good year and naturally cycles through good and bad seasons. But this year, the lack of crabs is tacked on to a much bigger problem. Those long, thin ropes that stretch from seafloor to surface have come under scrutiny for entangling endangered and threatened humpback whales. It’s an issue so contentious that in 2017, an environmental nonprofit sued the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, claiming it had failed to adequately protect the whales.
For the last six years, the lawsuit and subsequent settlement have squeezed crab season into shorter periods. In 2024, the traditional eight-month season opened on Jan. 15 and closed less than three months later. And it’s not just the length of the season — a 50% reduction in the number of traps allowed out at sea is becoming the new normal.
“Traditionally, this whole coast has been crab and salmon,” Day said. With California’s struggling salmon fishery shut down completely for the past two years due to past drought conditions and water management practices, many of the region’s commercial fishermen no longer have enough to catch. The Dungeness crab fleet has been cut in half since 1980, and with other fisheries facing their own challenges, the overall California commercial fishing fleet shrank by 80% in the same period.
Day still loves the adventure of going out on the water as much as he did at age 5 in his native New Zealand, when he got his first fly rod. “It’s just there. Passion’s just there,” he said. He takes pride in bringing in what he sees as a healthy, sustainable and local source of food, and one that has long been a holiday tradition in the Bay Area. Generations of fishermen have fueled a vibrant Coastside community, but for an increasing number of fishermen, passion isn’t paying.
“I don’t think some of the boats here are going to make it through the year,” Day said.
As Dungeness crab fishermen struggle to make ends meet, new whale conservation regulations are slated to take effect this year. “It’s going to have to be kind of a change in how the fishery has historically operated,” said Ryan Bartling, a senior environmental scientist and the manager of the state’s Whale Safe Fisheries program.
When asked if whale conservation and commercial Dungeness crab fishing can coexist, he said, “We’re pretty certain they can.” Whether that turns out to be true long term, he acknowledged, “that’s the million-dollar question.”
Sea sickness
The lawsuit against the Department of Fish and Wildlife followed a year that could be fairly described as a disaster.
“My gut told me: Something’s wrong,” Day recalled. It was 2015, and he had piloted his boat to Oregon and back twice to fish for salmon. In the water, usually teeming with life, he started to see dead fish and dead birds. “That whole year, there were things spinning out…The ocean was sick.”
A catastrophic marine heat wave now known as The Blob had warmed the Pacific Ocean from Alaska to Mexico by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average. Fish that spawn in summer began spawning in winter. There were mass die-offs and migration changes. All along the coast, a bloom of toxic domoic acid spread in shellfish. To protect consumers, California delayed the Nov. 15 opening of crab season an unprecedented five months. (Congress appropriated $25 million in disaster aid, which didn’t reach the fishermen until three years later.)
Farther south, in waters off Central America, 5,000 humpback whales were beginning their annual swim back up the continent from their breeding grounds. As The Blob changed the distribution of food sources, the whales’ migration path veered unusually close to the coast.
In April 2016, crab season finally opened for the fishermen in Pillar Point Harbor. They set out en masse, and all along the West Coast hundreds of thousands of pots went overboard and settled in crab country. But the monthslong delay had forced a grim coincidence: The fishermen had set their traps just as the migrating whales returned, and the humpbacks swam directly into all those vertical ropes. According to NOAA, 19 whales were reported entangled in West Coast Dungeness crab fishing gear that year, with 73% of them originating from the region that includes Half Moon Bay.
A center of gravity
In direct response to the 19 entanglements, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued the Department of Fish and Wildlife in October 2017.
“California officials can’t let this minefield of crab traps continue to slaughter endangered whales and sea turtles,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the center, in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “These tragic entanglements are happening in record-breaking numbers. That’s why we’ve had to sue to force California officials to finally take their responsibilities seriously.”
The lawsuit is widely criticized by fishermen, who point out that entanglement does not always lead to death. Fishermen bore the brunt of the resulting regulation, but they aren’t the nonprofit’s only critics.
“The center certainly has a reputation of pushing agencies really hard, and I know that there’s agencies that don’t necessarily like that,” said Benjamin Grundy, an oceans campaigner at the center. With a staff of more than 70 lawyers, “we like to hold a pretty strong line…we believe in the work that we do.”
Bartling and his colleagues at the Department of Fish and Wildlife had already begun to address the entanglement issue. Two years prior, the department had partnered with the California Ocean Protection Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service to form the California Dungeness Crab Fishing Gear Working Group.
“In some people’s view it wasn’t happening fast enough,” said Bartling. Though the lawsuit forced an accelerated timeline that has created strain for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, its goals are by and large shared by the department. Even without legal action requiring the new regulations, “we would have arrived at a very similar end result,” he said.
That end result, after a settlement in 2019, was a permanently changed crab season. With whales often present well into December, crab has become a late December or January species for the foreseeable future, meaning the Thanksgiving and Christmas markets that fishermen and customers relied on are likely gone.
And fishermen, many of whom paid around $150,000 for permits linked to the number of pots on their boats, have only been allowed to use half of their pots this year, a 50% gear reduction that is becoming increasingly common as officials try to reduce the number of lines encountered by whales. The end of the season has become unpredictable, dictated by the arrival of whales in spring.
“The first years (after the lawsuit) were terrible,” said Porter McHenry, a second-generation commercial fisherman born and raised in Half Moon Bay. “We were used to starting November 15. We had all our crew, we were ready to go.” Instead, Nov. 15 passed, and they sat in the harbor for weeks on standby. Fishing had always been a gamble, he said, but now the unpredictability of Mother Nature was compounded by the volatility of regulations.
Deckhands on boats around Pillar Point Harbor were accustomed to making as much as $130,000 per year in the fishery. Crews now found themselves out of work while waiting for whales to leave, with no definite timeline for the start or end of the season. As they abandoned the changing industry, captains were forced to find less experienced crews in what is already the most statistically deadly job in the U.S., with most fatalities occurring due to vessel disaster, according to the CDC.
Ten or 15 years ago, “the harbor was really just robust with life,” said fisherman Frank Sousa. Fishermen and deckhands were frequent patrons of nearby shops and restaurants, and the docks bustled with activity. But with the ongoing closure of the salmon fishery and such a short crab season, fishermen have less reason to be down at the docks, and not as much money to spend. “You go down there, you get your boat projects done, you go home,” Sousa said.
In that way, the whale entanglements have impacted the Coastside more broadly, even beyond the docks.
Whale tales
How whales get entangled still isn’t fully understood, according to John Calambokidis, a senior research biologist and co-founder of Cascadia Research Collective who has been studying humpback whales on the West Coast for 40 years.
“The Dungeness crab fishery, in particular, you would not think of as a fishery that would be particularly prone to whales getting entangled,” he said. “There’s a pot on the bottom, there’s a line coming up to buoys at the surface. I mean, how does a whale get entangled in that?”
He points to the scale of the fishery, with its several hundred thousand vertical lines in the water each crab season, as an explanation. Entanglements may be made worse by whales’ tendency to roll if they come in contact with a rope, which can exacerbate the situation.
“We see somewhere around the neighborhood of 20 to 30% of humpback whales on the West Coast that are alive, swimming around, (with) signs of scars that indicate they’ve been entangled in some part of their life,” Calambokidis said. That means that for every entanglement that is reported, there are many others that aren’t.
Along the California coast, nearly all of the humpback whales belong to one of two distinct herds, together totaling 5,000 whales, that migrate from the West Coast to breed near either Mexico or Central America each year. Though the total number of humpback whales in the Pacific is now considered healthy, those that breed near Mexico have been listed as threatened, and those that breed near Central America are endangered.
The fishermen take issue with the characterization of whales’ vulnerability. Day compares a fisherman entangling a whale to a driver hitting an animal on a roadway, and he points to research that shows the whale population is growing.
“Part of the reason for increased entanglements is increased whale populations,” Calambokidis said. “We’ve shown that humpback whale numbers have been increasing fairly dramatically, so that shows that they’re currently sustaining the current level of entanglements.”
Each year for the past 40 years, those endangered and threatened whale herds off California have grown steadily at 7% or 8%, so the stable or declining entanglement rates over the past 10 years represent real progress, he said. His group will be releasing a new population estimate this month.
But he also cautions against using population increase as the sole measure of success: If a whale becomes entangled and doesn’t break free of the ropes, it may drag the crab pot hundreds of miles or get entangled in additional fishing gear, tightening the ropes around its body. “Then you can start a process of very slow death,” Calambokidis said. “These are pretty tragic deaths.” The ropes can cut off blood flow to body parts, distort swimming and affect feeding if the rope goes through the whale’s mouth.
“I think most people accept that yes, entanglement will not be eliminated completely,” he said. “We want to take all of the actions that are feasible that allows the fishery to keep going and minimizes entanglement.”
Other fish in the sea
One of those actions is a change in rope color. Beginning this November, all commercial Dungeness crab fishermen in California will be required to replace their rope with new striped purple-and-black rope. This will distinguish them from Oregon (yellow-and-black rope) and Washington (red-and-black rope).
“When there’s an entanglement, having this line required is going to likely improve our ability to identify which fishery it belongs to,” Bartling said. The Department of Fish and Wildlife hopes to pay for a quarter of the line needed, but fishermen will have to pay for the rest.
Additionally, in accordance with the 2019 settlement, the Department of Fish and Wildlife submitted its portion of an Incidental Take Permit application in December 2024. The permit will effectively establish a hard limit on the number of humpback whales that can be entangled (i.e. “taken”) by Dungeness crab fishing gear each year. Bartling thinks California will be allowed one or two takes. The consequence for exceeding the take limit is still uncertain.
In 2023, the most recent year data is available, California had seven entanglements even after opening the season late, closing it early and only allowing fishermen to fish with 50% of their gear for a portion of the season. Bartling said NOAA could approve the permit and its new smaller limits as soon as next year.
McHenry makes things pencil out by fishing for squid during some months. “We’ve changed our operations to deal with this whale issue,” he said. Having more than one profitable species to fish for is insurance against bad years, like this year’s crab season.
Unfortunately, most fishermen at Pillar Point Harbor relied on salmon to supplement crab, and they sense that the season will remain closed this summer for a third consecutive year. To get into a fishery like squid is not feasible for most. McHenry estimates that it would cost more than $2 million to start fishing for squid from scratch. Even if a fisherman already has a big enough boat, the one-time permit alone runs $700,000 to $800,000.
Last year, Day signed up for an Experimental Fishing Permit, which allows fishermen to test new management approaches under short-term exemptions from fishing laws. He was part of a small group trying ropeless gear, also called pop-up traps, which many conservationists see as a possible entanglement solution. A daisy chain of 10 or more crab pots are connected by rope with just one buoy, which stays down on the seafloor. When fishermen are ready to retrieve the pots, they use a phone app to activate the buoy, and it springs to the surface on command.
“It’s nothing like the other one,” Day said of this new style of fishing. Pop-up gear requires excellent weather and an intelligent crew, and it’s slow. It helped him bring in additional money after the season had closed, but he doesn’t see it working during the brutal, blistering weeks of the core season.
By the third week of January, McHenry has brought in his crab gear. He’s done for 2025. It’s not worth the energy and expense to pull up pots that are nearly empty.
Day is still going out with his crew, using Mailchimp to let his more than 2,000 subscribers know when he’ll be at the dock with a fresh batch of Dungeness. “Just got in now with some California gold crabbies, they got Monday-itis, so come cure them by putting them in a nice hot sauna,” read a recent email.
When he opens his phone, he often gets sidetracked by pictures and videos of his life as a fisherman. “Look at that,” he said with excitement in one video of a blue whale breaching the surface nearby.
While he was out on the ocean last year, a large bluefin tuna jumped out of the water directly in front his boat. “I’m staring at its eyeball…if it had a finger it would have been (flipping me off).” He smiles. “The crew, they thought something was wrong cause I’m out here going, ‘Tuna! Tuna! Tuna!’” Then his crew noticed more tuna, and they all watched as a spectacle of “jumpers” passed by.
“I thought, ‘I’ve still got that childhood f—— excitement. Wow,’” Day said. “Still got the passion.”
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