Alaska News

Love of the ice -- and tasty king crabs -- keeps Nome crabber coming back

NOME -- Longtime Nome resident Pat Hahn likes to joke that the sea ice in this Bering Sea community made him famous.

As a youngster growing up in the Northwest Alaska hub, he spent much of his free time exploring the sea ice that envelops the town every winter, going so far as to follow local crab fishermen out on the ice to learn their ways. He remembers that one day a "funny looking" plane with a weird attachment on its underside flew over him while he was playing. Flash forward a year or so when the 8-year-old Hahn took a trip to Disneyland and took a moment to view an exhibit called "It's a Small World." A little film on Nome played and sure enough, there was little Hahn, playing on the sea ice.

Hahn hasn't had the same sort of global recognition since, but that hasn't extinguished his love of the ice. He still likes to drive his snowmachine to the edge of the ice sheet -- this year it extends about 3.5 miles from shore -- where he sits and watches the ice churn and form at the water's edge.

But a little closer to home, Hahn watches things a bit less epic -- his crabbing holes, small 4-foot-long openings he's carved in the sea ice that are just large enough to fit a crab pot.

Those small holes have given him and his family access to a Nome treat: fresh-caught red king crabs.

So far, about 180 people have received subsistence crabbing permits this season, according to Jim Menard, commercial fisheries biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Those subsistence fishermen are the Nome equivalent of Southcentral Alaska's sockeye salmon personal dipnet fishery at the mouth of the Kenai River, with a few key differences. The red king crab fishery has no limits on catch sizes -- both in terms of total crabs caught, sex or size of the animals. While commercial crab fishermen are restricted to certain areas of Norton Sound, subsistence crabbers can place their pots anywhere.

Where to place his pots is a technique Hahn has refined his over the years. All those years of playing on the ice mean he knows which areas are best for finding the crustaceans as well as which areas have ice only a couple feet deep -- as opposed to the 5 or 6 feet of ice in other places -- making it easier to drill the holes.

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Almost every day his pots are out, Hahn will snowmachine the 3 miles from shore to get them through a narrow, bumpy trail, the result of the telescoping ice sheets freezing into awkward places.

The holes aren't marked by much, just a simple wooden stick with Hahn's name and address marked on it. After reaching the pot, Hahn makes quick work of getting to the crabs, quickly shoveling snow off the plywood board he uses to insulate and cover the holes. Instead of creating new holes all season, he uses the same ones over and over, riding out to them each day to scoop out slush and chip away at ice that slowly envelops the holes.

Then it's on to the good stuff. Hahn, with help from his daughter, Brix, an Alaska Dispatch News marketing employee, slowly goes about lifting the homemade pot out of Norton Sound. Though not deep, maybe 60 feet, recovery requires slow movements. Crabs fall into the pots through a hole in the top and care must be taken to make sure any crabs slowly making their way into the cage don't tilt off as it rises to the surface.

A quick pull up and the pot, which is designed to barely fit through the hole, is on the ice surface. Hahn moves swiftly to pull them out of the pot, which he designed himself out of rebar and fish netting.

The first pot he pulled through ice in late March yielded only a few crabs. But as soon as he began pulling up his second, Hahn noted that it was heavy, a good sign.

"Unless I caught a rock," he joked.

Sure enough, up came about a dozen crabs, spindly and crawling over one another. The bait, a whole herring, had been stripped down to its skeleton. Hahn said most fish -- except halibut -- will attract crab. He's heard of other crabbers using all kinds of bait, though he tends to stick to food crabs find in the ocean.

"I've never seen a can of cat food floating around in the ocean and watching a crab eat it," he said.

Despite being able to take them all, Hahn generally doesn't, keeping only the few he plans to cook that day. That's intentional. Without a commercial operation, it's hard to properly store crabs.

So he takes some of the ones he's caught and sticks them in a cooler to be pulled back home while gently placing the others back in the pot to go back to the ocean until the next day, when he'll pull them out instead, adding more bait in an effort to lure crabs back.

"Live long and prosper," he said as he dropped a crab-filled pot back in.

Or at least until tomorrow.

Suzanna Caldwell

Suzanna Caldwell is a former reporter for Alaska Dispatch News and Alaska Dispatch. She left the ADN in 2017.

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