HOMER, Alaska—The dawn sky appeared in shades of gray over the port city of Homer on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula as a cold wind blew across Kachemak Bay.
Snow-capped mountains stood tall and vast beyond the narrow geographical land bridge called Homer Spit—beyond the weathered tapestry of seasonal tourist shops, restaurants, boatyards, and fishing vessels moored in the harbor near the land’s end.
All was quiet in the winter harbor at 9:30 a.m., save for a handful of men making repairs to the Tempest, an aging cod fishing boat from Seattle tied down at Ramp 8.
Sparks flew from an arc welder’s torch as white-hot steel in the Tempest’s bow sizzled and sputtered.
“We’re just here doing our jobs,” said one of the men in blue coveralls. “There was a hole in the vessel. I stuck my pocket knife through it.”
Smiling, he said the boat “needs help.”
The men all work at a local company that services fishing vessels of many types and sizes. Only a few crab boats will need fixing this year, because of the cancellation of the 2022–23 king and snow crab seasons.
In 2020, commercial landings of Alaska snow crab totaled more than 36.6 million pounds and were valued at more than $101.7 million, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries data.
“If they ain’t going to fish, they ain’t going to do repairs,” the employee told The Epoch Times.
“It’s a big effect on everybody. We'll feel some effect of it, yes. The boats have canceled work—repairs—because they know they ain’t going out” to sea.
The situation was similar at the Kachemak Gear Shed in Homer, where sales representative Travis Kuhn said fewer crab boats out on the water means fewer customers are buying supplies.
“The effect it’s having on us is our numbers have been down. Not as many crabbers have been buying the pots and the lines,” Kuhn said.
“As a business here in Homer, we’re feeling the effects of losing the crab, for sure.”
He said the parent company serves about 85 percent of Alaska’s crab fishing fleet. But this year, sales volumes are way down as the king and snow crab fisheries dry up.
“We just lost so much crab over the years due to what the government is saying is global warming. We’re just losing all this crab,” Kuhn told The Epoch Times.
“Last year, it was chaos, especially in early October. Now, all the crabbers we’ve seen aren’t around. We’ve probably helped only two boats, but that was before the cancellation.”
Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang on Oct. 17 announced the cancellation of the annual Bering Sea snow crab harvest for the first time after bottom trawl surveys showed a sudden decline of about 90 percent in the snow crab population, to 1 billion from 8 billion in 2018.
For the first time in 25 years, Alaska Fish and Game called off the Bering Sea red king crab fishery harvest in 2021, and again in 2022, due to consistently low counts.
“It was a tough call—one of the toughest calls a commissioner can make. Without any crabs coming, it’s the only lever we can pull to try and help conserve the crabs and the fishery,” said Rick Green, special assistant to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game commissioner.
“It’s going to be a significant hit across the state. The southeast will take a hit—wherever snow crab is taken. Some of the islands’ operating revenues depend on the revenues from crab receipts.
“From all I’m hearing, it was probably a one-off [event involving] a bunch of different factors.”
The cold pool theory seeks to explain the rapid die-off. It holds that young juvenile snow crabs will huddle in the melting sea ice pools at the sea bottom. Their small size makes them especially vulnerable to predators.
Green said the rapid disappearance of billions of snow crabs isn’t a well-defined event and the science is far from settled. The ocean is like a “big black empty box,” he told The Epoch Times.
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy issued a plea for federal assistance in light of the historic closures.
In an Oct. 21 letter to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Dunleavy, a Republican, requested federal fishery disaster relief for Alaska’s crab fishermen to make up for an estimated $288 million loss of industry revenues.
“Available information indicates the reductions in abundance for both crab stocks resulted from natural causes linked to warming ocean temperatures,” Dunleavy said.
Jamie Goen, executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers trade association in Seattle, said the Alaskan red king crab had declined steadily for years.
She said many king crabs now don’t reach a size suitable for harvest.
The sharp drop in snow crab numbers came unexpectedly, Goen noted, and was probably caused by “many factors.”
While climate change is a likely culprit, Goen said Canada’s snow crab population is booming.
“Their harvests are up. We’ve been talking with them. It’s interesting—why is Alaska experiencing climate change, but their harvests are up in these other areas?”
Another possible factor is that warmer ocean temperatures attract snow crab predators such as cod.
Crab fishing trawlers could also be responsible for disrupting snow crab breeding areas, Goen said.
“There’s a lot to be learned as to what’s going on in different parts of the world—why the stock handles it differently,” she told The Epoch Times.
One thing is sure, Goen said, “there’s not going to be a lot [of snow crab] coming from Alaska” in 2022.
“There is some limited harvest in other parts of Alaska, but the largest fisheries are Bristol Bay red king crab and snow crab. No snow crab will come from the U.S. market.”
About 10 percent of the global crab market comes from the United States, while Russia, Canada, and Norway are other large markets. However, the Biden administration has banned all Russian seafood imports over the war in Ukraine.
Goen said it could take three to five years for the snow crab population to recover. In the meantime, those who make a living harvesting crabs will suffer.
“They can’t weather this. We’re trying to keep our fisheries in business,” she said.
Homer port director and harbormaster Bryan Hawkins said about eight large Bering Sea crab boats remain to feel the impact of the snow crab fishery closure.
“Every fishery has an impact. In trawl fisheries, by-catch has been an issue for decades. It’s been controlled,” Hawkins told The Epoch Times.
“There has been an impact from trawl fishing over the years, but I believe this hard turn—this dramatic change that we’ve seen—is more climate [related].
“Not normal—unprecedented. Never seen.”
Because the fishing fleet in Homer is diverse, many crabbers have switched to other fisheries to compensate for their losses.
“Like any business, the more diversity you have, the better you can survive the ups and downs of the industry. Many of these vessels have other work they can and will do,” Hawkins said.
Despite much speculation, nobody can pinpoint the exact cause of the snow crab collapse. Hawkins warns people to be careful of finger-pointing.
“That’s why science needs to catch up. It would be great if we could learn more about what’s happening,” he said. “The Arctic is changing. It is a bellwether for the world. We should pay attention.”
Homer Mayor Ken Castner said previous signs had pointed to a banner snow crab harvest in 2022.
“They expected a huge year this year in [snow crab]. They expected unbelievable biomass. They started looking and couldn’t find it at all. It was a big mystery.”
In 2005, the U.S. government began regulating select red king and snow crab fisheries in Alaska under a rights-based quota system. The new system prompted a consolidation of the crab fishing fleet to about 80 boats from 180, Castner said.
Something “strange” is happening, he said.
There were so many snow crabs a year ago. And people were excited about the upcoming season.
“People were going after quota this year like crazy,” he said. “Now, it’s zero.”
Castner believes the quota system is “broken,” and the continued loss of directed fisheries enables indiscriminate catches of factory trawlers.
“It’s hard to justify giving the trawlers 5 million pounds of quota and closing everybody else. I’m not a fan of the directed fisheries bearing the brunt of conservation,” he said.
During the 1970s, crab fishing in Kachemak Bay was plentiful, and the product was relatively cheap. As crab fishing moved further west, Bristol Bay became a mainstay for the industry.
Homer is not only home to many crab fishermen. It’s an essential marine support base for fishing boats.
Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands chain is a significant crab fishing hub these days, while Homer has fewer than a dozen crab boats and fewer jobs from consolidation.
“Some of these guys have been sitting on the beach for years [when] they started consolidating and putting them into fewer boats,” Castner said.
Most of the large boats in the harbor are transient vessels. Some are crab boats with captains that only see their expenses continue to mount with the canceled crab harvests.
“We’re at maximum capacity. We'd gotten used to the idea that some of these vessels would be moving, leaving. We have to turn some away because the vessels aren’t leaving and going to work,” Hawkins said.
Castner said the crab fishermen are “quite worried.”
“It’s like a crop failure. There are programs for something like that, but they have nothing for the fishermen. There are also a lot of suspicions that we should have known it was coming, or maybe we had too big a quota.”
At Alice’s Champagne Palace in Homer, longtime employee Laura Duncan remembered how it used to be “open season” for the entire crab fishing fleet in Alaska before the government set quotas.
“You'd have 4 million pounds of crabs—go get them,” she told The Epoch Times, but the adoption of quotas is when things changed for the economy. “They had giant buybacks of the big crab boats, and they started combining crab boats.
“It’s pretty lame. It hurt the local economy when they went to [quotas] on crabs.”
Lifelong Homer resident Jared Truman Porter said he’s been harvesting red king and snow crab for 20 years. He owns a crab boat, the Liberty, that operates with five or six deckhands.
He also works on the 113-foot commercial crab fishing boat Time Bandit, featured on the Discovery Channel series “Deadliest Catch.”
“It’s a serious situation for us,” Porter, 44, said of the canceled crab harvests.
He can cover his losses by harvesting salmon, cod, and halibut. But crab fishing is a “pretty big industry for a lot of people. Now, a lot of people are out of jobs. It’s a bummer to see any resources die off like that.”
He said the key to survival in the fishing business is through a diversity of catches.
“We love crabbing, of course, but we also want to see the resource come back,” Porter told The Epoch Times. “As for them shutting us down, it may be the beginning of returning the resource. But I think the main problem, realistically, goes elsewhere.”
Porter also believes that large crab fishing trawlers have had a negative effect on crab numbers and breeding habitats.
He theorizes that the warming of Bristol Bay and the Bering Sea has caused a massive snow crab migration toward colder, deeper waters beyond the usual testing spots for the annual scientific surveys.
“As a crabber, I’ve noticed the crabs migrating farther north offshore. You’re testing fishing the same waters, but the crabs have migrated to areas with food to support mass numbers,” Porter said.
“I believe you may have to change your way of testing and go to new waters. Global warming has an impact on certain species and not on others. Crabs are at a low; salmon are at a high.”
It’s devastating for locals who depend on the crab fishery and must now struggle to support their families and businesses.
“So now we have to figure out new ways to get support and income,” Porter said.
But once a crab fisherman, always a crab fisherman.
For Porter, what began years ago as a test of strength and fortitude, working in one of the most dangerous jobs on earth has become a lifelong adventure.
“An average day in the Bering Sea is second to none, man,” he said. “The weather is brutal. The waves are big—the boat’s rocking. The work is intense; it’s long hours—backbreaking [work]. Almost like a sport.
To be a crabber, Porter said, one must be tough, resilient, and willing to sacrifice everything.
He wanted to become that individual.
“I wanted to show the guys that I could do it, [then] it just became a passion,” he said. “I love it. And that’s the way it is with crabbers.”
