The Crabs in Winter

A friend from the Rest of the U.S. dropped by today. He’d driven a truck over the borders to help out another friend. That friend was crossing the ocean from Blaine to Point Roberts to empty his crab pots and take them out of the water because the end of the crab season is upon us. They’ve caught crab off these waters for as long as anyone knows about it, although I have never seen one of these crabs in an edible state. You can get a license to put just a pot or two in the water, apparently, and that’s what I’d have to do to see one, let alone eat one, but that would also require me to have a boat and to take the pot out and collect the contents periodically. What with the cost of boats and the cost of fuel, it’s cheaper to buy the crab as it swims through the market.

There are also commercial licenses, which cost a lot ($40,000 or so, says our friend and then there is a yearly keeping the license fee) but which permit you to have 50 pots. Further, you can lease somebody else’s license, which will give you another 50 pots. The season lasts 2-4 months (October to whenever they close it) and you empty the pots every five days or so. Our friend says that a good season will net a crabber $100,000, at $4/pound, which is this year's price. This season, he says, was not so good.

A bad season can result from your losing your crab pots themselves. They are big wire cylinders, connected to multicolor floats (so you can find them) and cost maybe $100/each. You can lose your pots because other, bad-apple crabbers (evil doers, I think they are called) take them when you are not there looking. Or just cut your floats loose so you cannot find your pots. Or you can have a bad season because there are not so many crabs as you were hoping for or because crabs have finally gotten smart enough not to walk into the traps.

I don’t know what was the cause of this year’s bad season, but I’d put my money on ‘not so many crabs.’ When we first came to the Northwest, Eastern Canada had a big cod fishery; now it has no cod fishery. When we first came here, Western Canada had a big salmon fishery; now, though there still are salmon, they are not so common. In the early years of our residence, the markets had all kinds of fresh salmon, and if you wanted them even fresher, you could go down to the marina and buy them right off the boats as they came in. Native Americans have special fishing/salmon access in B.C., and whenever you gave a ride to a Native hitchhiker, he’d almost always ask whether you wanted to buy a salmon.

There were king, sockeye, spring, and keta. They cost, at most, $4-$5 a pound, and keta usually cost $2. (Keta is also known as ‘dog salmon’ for reasons that I take to be obvious, but it, too was pretty good.) Salmon was everywhere and we ate it all the time, and it was wonderful. Nowadays, salmon are just as available, but they are mostly ‘Farmed Atlantic,’ which means that they are an Atlantic-type salmon, farmed right here on the west coast, and with the taste of an animal that has been raised on bread crumbs or something similarly inoffensive. We still see some fresh ‘Wild Salmon,’, but it is more likely to be in the range of $10-$12 a pound, and you can't assume that it will be around in season.

I’m glad we were here, if only at the end, of the Great Abundant Salmon Festival. My then-three-year-old granddaughter, when offered her first salmon meal, refused to eat it. When I asked her why, she said indignantly, ‘I do not want to eat a fish named Sam.” She’s 17 now and a vegetarian. But, to all the fish named Sam that we have known, I want to say, 'Thanks! You were extraordinary and we remember you fondly. I only hope your descendants will do better than the cod have and than maybe the crab are doing.' Hope is what we are working with now.