After a month of preparations in our homeport of Crescent City, California, the good ship Miss Heidi finally made it down to Bodega Bay to participate in an experimental “pop-up” buoy test fishery for Dungeness Crab. Along with about 30 other commercial crab boats from Monterey Bay to Point Arena, we are testing a new system which combines acoustic technology with traditional fishing methods. The goal is to be able to reopen spring and early summer crabbing for the commercial boats while avoiding gear interactions with ESA listed Humpback whales, which are migrating and feeding at this time of year in the crab grounds from Morro Bay in the south to Cape Mendocino in the north.

This area has been mostly off-limits to crab traps before January 1st and after March 30 since the Center for Biological Diversity negotiated an out-of-court settlement with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in 2019, requiring the state managers to apply for an Incidental Take Permit to be allowed to continue conducting a fishery which “co-occurs” with ESA marine mammals. Six years later, NOAA Fisheries has still not approved the State’s application, and crab gear entanglements with Humpbacks have increased, despite strict measures enacted by CDFW, including cutting trap allotments during the regular season in half and shortening it from the traditional 7 months to 3-4 months. Because Humpbacks are a listed species, the allowable threshold for entanglements is only 3 per year, even if most whales survive these encounters and the population growth is unaffected by them.

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Drastically curtailing the fishing industry due to a few entanglements is kind of like shutting down our highways because deer are being hit and killed by cars or shutting down the marine shipping industry because cargo ships and cruise ships run down and kill whales on a regular basis. However, these aren’t even fair comparisons to the crab fishery because both cars and ships are responsible for many more collisions with animals than the number of whales which will ever encounter a crab buoy line.

Meanwhile, the West Coast Humpback population has been steadily expanding at a rate of 6-8% a year, and there are now upwards of 7,000 mature whales feeding and migrating along our coastal waters in the spring, summer and fall months, with 500 healthy calfs being added to the herd annually. The reality on the crab grounds now is it will be impossible to have a viable commercial fishery without doing it when the whales are present, too.

It is a defensible position for the fishing industry to take that the Humpback population is thriving and should be delisted by NOAA, and this is why the California Coast Crab Association (which I represent as President) is trying to make this case to the new administration in Washington. A few months ago, President Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick pledged to pursue regulatory relief for the nation’s most over-burdened fisheries. We think we qualify. For more background, see my post headlined “Fish, Baby, Fish!” from April.

The other day, while longlining sets of 40 traps from the ocean bottom, with the helm on auto pilot, I started to see groups of large humpbacks appear around our gear. It occurred to me it was the first time since our troubles started in 2016 that seeing whales show up on our crab grounds wasn’t an anxiety-inducing event. Why? Because there’s basically zero chance the whales will get tangled up in this type of crab fishing gear.

Let me explain: We have a 400-trap allotment in ten 40- trap sets. The 40 traps are spaced 360’ apart, along one groundline which sits on the ocean bottom. Each end also has a 60 fathom buoy line with a buoy attached, but the line and buoy are packed into a “sled” which also sits on the ocean floor. There is no line, buoys or traps where the whales swim.

Here’s how it works: the “sled” has a battery-operated cam which turns and releases the “pucker” holding a hard plastic buoy ball, when we send an acoustic signal from a transducer submerged from our boat. I can see where our sets and every other boat’s sets are because I have a tablet with an app in the wheelhouse which shows all sets within 5 miles of our vessel. Picture an electronic navigation chart for the ocean like the “maps” app on your phone.

So, when we are ready to “run” a set of 40 traps, we pull up to one end, hit the “release” command, wait for the buoy to pop up, drive over to it, grab it and start pulling the longline. Every trap comes on the boat and the line is coiled into totes. If I like what I’m seeing in the traps, I might set them back nearby. If not, we try a new area and re-set the longline and two pop-up sleds, and mark it in the app. I have included a video of my crew pulling a longline a few days ago 10 miles off the coast of north-central California (video is embedded in the text).

Here’s what we think about it: the F/V Miss Heidi is catching crabs again in the late spring and early summer and making money. Our bills are getting paid. My crew is happy and will still be there for me to do our next fishery this summer (longlining black cod traps). The boat is working, consumers are getting a great seafood product, the whales are also feeding freely and not getting wrapped up in any buoy lines— and there may be hope again for our commercial crab fleet. We all got fed and nobody died… it was a good start to summer.