‘Deadliest Catch’-22: Shutdown may ground crabbing fleet, spoil industry’s richest month

The pots are stacked and the boats are packed with crews craving fishing season’s most fruitful frenzy – the one-month, multimillion-dollar harvest of red king crabs from the ocean floors near Alaska’s shores.

Now, the dreariest catch: the federal shutdown means no crabbing permits are being granted to the boats’ skippers. Without those licenses, dozens of vessels will remain docked indefinitely, their captains legally barred from dropping baited traps, or “pots,” on the season’s opening day, Oct. 15. That would, in turn, leave the crabbing industry reeling and would financially swamp hundreds of fishermen, who earn half of their annual pay during the four-week king-crabbing spree.

Thanks to Capitol Hill’s political snag, the Super Bowl of fishing seasons may be delayed or canceled, spawning global crustacean frustration, from wholesale markets and restaurants touting their superior shellfish to the world’s most crucial crab consumers – Japanese citizens who mark an annual, pre-winter holiday by giving and devouring the gift of red king crabs.

“Tens of millions of dollars are potentially at risk if we can’t get the product to market in time for the holiday season in Japan,” said Mark Gleason, executive director of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, a trade association that represents most of the crab fishermen who work aboard 80 boats, some made famous through the TV show “Deadliest Catch.”

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Catch shares leave fishermen reeling

SAN FRANCISCO – For centuries, men like Larry Collins, a garrulous crab and sole fisherman, were free to harvest the seas.

But sweeping across the globe is a system that slowly and steadily hands over a $400 billion ocean fishing industry to corporations. The system, called catch shares, in most cases favors large fishing fleets, a review of the systems operating across the United States shows.

“We’ve been frozen out,” said Collins, who docks near the Golden Gate Bridge. “This system has given it all to the big guys.”

More and more wild-caught fish species and fishing territories in the United States are managed under catch shares, which work by providing harvesting or access rights to fishermen. These rights – worth tens of billions of dollars in the United States alone – are translated into a percentage, or share, that can then be divided, traded, sold, bought or leveraged for financing, just like any asset.

Catch shares have been backed by an alliance of conservative, free-market advocates and environmental groups, some of which have financed scientific studies promoting the merits of the system, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

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