Crab crash: Effects of collapsed Bering Sea crab stocks are being felt far beyond the fleet
The crash in Bering Sea crab stocks is translating to serious impacts for fishermen and communities across the Western Alaska coast. From the top, the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery is closed entirely this season for the first time since the 1990s, while the Bering Sea snow crab total allowable catch was reduced by nearly 90 percent. In the meantime, fishermen who depend on crab are dealing with the fallout of those cuts this year. Gabriel Prout of Kodiak was waiting out a storm in the Akutan harbor last week, after finishing up his snow crab season. The F/V Silver Spray, the vessel he owns with his father and brothers, was only able to go out for 100,000 pounds of snow crab. Of that, they only caught about 75,000 pounds because the fishing was so slow; they traded the rest of the quota for bairdi and headed south. >click to read< 17:39
Leave a Reply