With the season winding down, fishermen and processors agree that the Bering Sea snow crab is a welcome change from last year's winter when record ice dragged it out until June.
"The season so far is just going fine. There's no comparison to last year when the ice was an issue," said Unisea crab manager Al Mendoza. "Last year was extreme," he added.
More than 80 percent of the 66.3 million pound quota had been harvested as of March 18, Mendoza said. Mendoza said Unisea has posted a preliminary price of $2 per pound, subject to a postseason increase depending on sales. He said the snow, or opilio, crab are averaging about 1.4 pounds each, and are of generally high quality, with good meat content, though with more discolored shells than buyers prefer.
Ice was only a minor issue this year, only briefly descending south to the Pribilof Islands, a group of four volcanic islands off the southwestern coast of Alaska, causing very few fishermen to suspend fishing -- "very few guys did, nothing like last year," Mendoza said.
Unisea's northern share crab was custom processed by Icicle Seafoods' floating processor Robert M. Thorstenson, and later by Trident, Mendonza said.
Northern share crab can only be processed in the north Bering Sea region, and for practical purposes that means St. Paul, where Trident has the only shoreplant in the north, said Jake Jacobsen, manager of the Inter-Cooperative Exchange, representing about 80 percent of the crab fleet.
Last week, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Unalaska reported that 38 boats were still fishing, while 32 had finished luring the snow crab into the big 700-pound-average baited steel pots resting on the bottom of the ocean.
Most of the ICE fleet has finished fishing, or are on their last trips, though some boats may have as many as three trips to go, said Jacobsen, saying that all the crab should be landed by the middle of April, and perhaps earlier.
"We just made our last northern delivery. That's always a big milestone in a season," he said, adding that fishing conditions keep improving. "The ice is retreating, and fishing is good. The world is beautiful," Jacobsen said.
All the processors are posting $2 per pound, a little higher than last year's early price, which ended up postseason at $2.17 per pound for "A" shares making up 87 percent of the harvest tied to individual processors, while "undesignated" crab fetched $2.34 a pound from the quota shares assigned three percent to skippers and 10 percent to catcher-processors.
"That little bit of crab that's free market, we usually do a little better on," he said.
While Jacobsen hopes to see a higher price this year, he said negative factors include a weakening of the dollar compared to the Japanese yen, "bad news for us." And a high percentage of crab with unattractive shell coloration adds to fishermen's market worries, as do generally smaller opies, he said.
The post-season price is usually determined by the "Sackton formula" based on historic prices compiled by John Sackton, a Lexington, Massachusetts consultant and publisher of the Internet commercial fishing news site, seafood.com, Jacobsen said.
When processors and fishermen don't agree on a price set by the Sackton formula, the next step is arbitration, Jacobsen said.
This article originally appeared in The Bristol Bay Times/The Dutch Harbor Fisherman and is reprinted here with permission.