Editorial: Storm clouds gather over local crabbing fleet

Danger

With little or no sleep leading to exhaustion, the Dungeness fishery off Washington and Oregon is among the most dangerous jobs in the country. Winter weather and ocean conditions can be crazy. Fatalities are all too common, while crabbers barely bother mentioning all the back injuries, damaged fingers and a litany of other mishaps. Even so, there are plenty of local guys who don’t want it any other way. They see risk as the price of freedom.

Unlike the Bering Sea crab fisheries, TV hasn’t done much to glamorize our Dungeness crab fleet. Maybe that’s a good thing. While our crabbers deserve recognition, many wouldn’t appreciate their hard work and bruises being turned into somebody else’s entertainment.

All we who live in Pacific and Clatsop counties should, however, routinely honor the crabbers, fishermen and oystermen who make their homes here. Driving around, it’s easy to think that tourism and real estate are where all our money comes from. And those businesses are important. But seafood remains a key building block of our economy and character. Without the solid income produced by the genuine hard work of our seafood workforce, this could be a hollow place.

Expert observations

“Anytime the crab fleet has to suffer though Christmas without income, it is traumatic from a financial point of view, and especially hard on the crew members that really depend on crab for winter income,” industry leader Dale Beasley commented in the run-up to this long-delayed opening date.

“People are not choosing to get out of business, fishing is the only way of life they know or can honestly make a decent living locally,” he said. “It is the next generation of fishing families that are at significant risk of not getting into fishing that is of most concern today. In recent years, the Columbia River Crab Fishermen’s Association established a $3 million permit-purchasing loan fund for local fishermen, but we did not have one taker due to the significant economic strains on the local fleet. It already has excess debt, so much debt that taking on more was not realistic. Scary times ahead.”

Beasley cites several factors in the dwindling of local crabbing, and of commercial fishing in general.

• The price of getting into the crab fishery has gone up significantly. The price of permits, a capable vessel, and gear is now over $1.5 million. “Try that on for size when you are 30 or so and considering fishing for a life’s work as fishing opportunity is shrinking dramatically,” he said.

• “Too many regulations and loss of ecosystem function as our population increases are crowding out the next generation of local coastal family fishermen. Simple things like tire dust from a lot of cars on the roads is washing into our streams and rivers, killing even returning adult salmon before they can spawn.”

• “When the dams were built some hatcheries were not just built to save salmon from loss of spawning grounds, they were built to save salmon dependent jobs, as well. Legislators forget over time that mitigation for lost access to fish is necessary into perpetuity to maintain jobs lost to industrialization and population growth; our fishing fleet is suffering from this legislative forgetfulness.”

• “Today over 90% of the Dungeness crab fleet fishes in only 38 miles of Washington coast between Westport and the Columbia River, which is in significant conflict with the new emerging industrial sprawl that is attempting to take over the last remaining place to fish today. … Offshore wind is one of the last major storms on the horizon that will sink our fishing fleet.”

“Uncontrolled sea lion populations are exploding and dining on salmon returning to spawn. Avian predation is also out of control, eating outgoing salmon smolts. Dungeness crab is the only commercial species left to harvest that can supply necessary tonnage to maintain our local ports.”

Preserve the genuine

In ranch country, a famous expression used to ridicule people who pretend to know western ways without ever having bloodied a knuckle on a loading chute is “All hat and no cattle.” Here along the West Coast and in Puget Sound, a similar expression might be “All boast and no boat.” This can be said of too many communities that have lost their real connections to the ocean and its traditions. Sanitized, they trade on maritime themes without any actual substance.

Thanks to crabbers and other essential workers, our home is still as real as it gets. You can’t fake actual authenticity. We must do all we can to keep it this way.