Tag Archives: slow start
Too Few Tuna! Commercial season off to standard slow start
Safe Coast Seafoods and Ilwaco Landing each recorded their first offload of the 2021 commercial tuna season Monday, July 12 in Ilwaco. Landings have been slow to start the season, fishermen and processors reported, which is par for the course. August has historically been the month with the heaviest commercial tuna landings for Oregon and Washington, with the season wrapping up around October, depending on weather. “It’s a pretty typical start with fish scattered and in low numbers, but we are encouraged that the water temperature and sea life look more typical and are in good shape to hold large numbers (of tuna) as they come in,” >7 photos, click to read< 18:49
Red king crab fishery off to a slow start
The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery is off to a slow start, compared to last year, according to Miranda Westphal, shellfish biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Unalaska. The season opened Oct. 15, and on Monday, just over a week into the fishery, only 1.5 million pounds had been landed. In the same time period last year, the boats had hauled in 6 million pounds. The fishery’s performance, though, is not unexpected, and is in line with what biologists learned during pre-season surveys. She said 52 boats were fishing on,,, click here to read the story 20:29
Santa Cruz crabbers face a slow start to the season
Three weeks into commercial crab season, Santa Cruz harbor fishermen are having a tough time finding crabs. “The season in Santa Cruz has been pretty slow,” said Hans Haveman of H&H Fresh Fish, a wholesale and retail fish seller at the harbor. “There’s crabs coming in, but not nearly in the numbers we would like or that we’d seen in the past few years.” The harbor has 15 to 20 active commercial crab boats that fish for the wildly popular Dungeness crab along with the less famous rock and spider crab, according to the Santa Cruz harbormaster. Three weeks into the season last year, each boat was bringing in an average of 800 to 1,000 pounds of crab a day, but this year that number has plummeted to about 100 to 200 pounds a day. “We don’t really know what’s going on,” Haveman said, who buys crabs from nine boats. Read the story here 11:13
Terrible weather conditions are blamed for slow start to lobster fishery in Fortune Bay
Exceptional windy conditions resulted in most fishers only being able to haul their pots three or four times during each of the first two weeks of the season, which opened on April 16. Veteran fish harvester Ernest Follett of Grand Bank said his catch rate is down over 30 per cent compared to the first week or so of fishing last year. “It’s not fit,” he said. “With the wind from the northeast, the lobsters just don’t crawl.” Another factor may also have affected catch rates. During the first week of the season, many of the Grand Bank lobster fishers had no choice but to use frozen herring for bait as very little fresh fish was available. Read the story here 16:19
