As Alaska cancels its snow crab season, Oregon’s commercial fishing industry feels the effect

In mid-October, the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that it would be canceling the winter snow crab season. This is the first time the snow crab season has been canceled in the Bering Sea. The state agency says the closure follows declining numbers of the crustacean.

Chuck Jackson is based in Newport and is the chief engineer and senior deckhand for the F/V Atlantico. He joins us to share what this closure means for some of Oregon’s commercial fishers.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. These are dark days for Alaskan crabbers. A few weeks ago Alaskan officials canceled the fall Bristol Bay red king crab harvest for the second year in a row and for the first time ever they canceled the winter harvest of snow crab. That’s after a recent report found that their population had plummeted 90% in just two years. Chuck Jackson, who grew up in Oregon is the chief engineer and senior deckhand on the fishing vessel Atlantico. He joins us to talk about what these closures will mean. Chuck Jackson, thanks for making time for us.

Chuck Jackson: Hello, how are ya?

Miller: Just fine. Thanks for joining us. I want to start briefly just with a little bit of your history before we get to the closure. You grew up in Depoe Bay on Oregon’s Central Coast. What was your first job in the fishing industry?

Jackson: My first job in the fishing industry probably was when I was hired by the Depoe Bay harbor master to collect garbage out of the bay with my little rowboat when I was about eight years old.

Miller: Wow!

Jackson: By the time I was 10 years old, I started working seasonally in the summers on commercial salmon trolling boats out of Depoe Bay which once upon a time was a commercial fishing village. So I started at about 10 years old working on salmon trollers. When I was 17, I went to Kodiak, Alaska, for the first time and was employed by my uncle who was a crab boat captain and I worked for him for about three months and then he took a job on another boat and I stayed on that boat, and my career just kind of went from there. That was 1987 when I was 17.

Miller: So there was no chance that you weren’t going to go into this industry, starting basically at the age of eight?

Jackson: Being from the Oregon Coast, you grow up with two choices: you either go to sea or you go to the woods. So you either become a logger or a fisherman. All the men before me went to Alaska to work. I saw that as a very attractive lifestyle as I was literally born on the side of the ocean. I grew up a stone’s throw from the ocean. I grew up very intimately with the ocean and I grew fondness for boats at a very young age.

Miller: What did Alaska mean to you as a boy growing up in Oregon?

Jackson: Moooooooneeeeey!

Miller: (laughter) That’s one word. Can you give us a sense for how much more money you could make in say a crabbing season in Alaska compared to Dungeness off the coast of Oregon?

Jackson: Let’s put it this way, my cousin is also a fisherman and he is the captain of a boat and he works about 11 months out of the year and I work about 10 months out of the year and I’m a deckhand and I make more money than he does in Alaska and he is a Newport, Oregon, boat captain. I probably make twice as much as I could working in Oregon full time as a fisherman. I have done Dungeness fished and salmon trolled as an adult out of Newport, Charleston and Reesport and stuff.

Miller: So you call yourself a deckhand, but I guess officially you’re chief engineer and senior deckhand, so that’s your official title for this fishing vessel. What does that mean to be an engineer on a boat?

Jackson: I operate and maintain all the equipment. These large fishing vessels are basically like floating tractors. They have complicated equipment systems. I have four large engines, main propulsion, steerage, electrical and plumbing. I work with 208(V) 3 phase electrical equipment. It’s a lot of knowledge that basically I started learning at a very young age. I was kind of taken under the wing by the chief engineer on the first boat I worked on and I decided very early on that I wanted to do that. I was somewhat mechanically inclined and it’s kind of a way to climb the ladder and earn more respect and responsibility and you also get paid a little better.

Miller: Where were you just a couple weeks ago when you heard about the closure of the snow crab fishery for the year?

Jackson: We were actually traveling back from the Bering Sea to Kodiak Island. We were just participating in a Pacific gray cod fishery that is another pot fishery that we were also involved in. We have permits to fish that as well.

Miller: What went through your mind?

Jackson: Oh crap. Well, the king crab fishery was not a surprise to us–it had been closed down last year. We knew that it was gonna get closed down again. The likelihood of that opening up anytime soon is little to none. I would personally count on probably never king crab fishing in Bristol Bay again in my career. Opilio is the actual name of snow crab which is just a market name. So we know them as Opilio tanner crab or we abbreviate and call them Opies. They’re smaller crabs and they’re biomass. So there are more of them. When we’re doing really well king crab fishing, we’ll catch 100 crab per pot. When we’re doing really well Opie fishing, we’ll catch 500-600 per pot. So the long and the short of it is that I make about half of my income off of Opilio crab in recent years. So obviously my biggest concern is that there’s a big chunk of my income that is now going away probably for the unforeseeable future. Usually when they close fisheries down like that, they don’t just close them down for a year or two. These are slow growing animals–I think an Opie crab is something like seven years old to be marketable. You have to assume that it could take a decade to rebuild those stocks if the environmental conditions are just right for them to recover at all.

Miller: And even that last one is a big “if.” For example, if one of the reasons for this decline is a warming ocean. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game said in a statement announcing this closure, “Understanding crab fishery closures have substantial impacts on harvesters industry and communities. ADF&G must balance these impacts with the need for long term conservation and sustainability of crab stocks.” In other words, we know this is going to be hard on you, but we have to do this if we want there to be crab in the future. What impact do you think this closure is going to have on the industry as a whole?

Jackson: Well, that’s a good question. The fishing industry in general is very resilient. These are very intelligent people that are very creative and there are other options out there that we will have to rely on more heavily. As a whole, the fishing industry isn’t going anywhere. It’s just going to hurt a lot of people. There’s a lot of people involved, there’s a lot of money involved, too. To become an Opilio crab fisherman, you can’t just go buy a boat and go out there and catch them. There’s millions of dollars worth of rights that you have to own to be able to do that. And most of those rights are actually purchased with loans. So a lot of these quota holders (permit holders) actually are making payments on something that they cannot make money off of. So there’s going to be a lot of impact.

There’s small towns, there are several towns in the Bering Sea in the Alaskan Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands that are purely fishing villages. So they are 100% fishermen-supported villages. So basically all the money that they bring in comes from the fishing industry, and our crab is a considerable chunk. What that actual number is, I don’t know, but it will impact a lot of small communities and processing plants. I’m in a fairly good position here throughout this, I will survive this, but there are a lot of fishermen who will probably bow out of the industry. There are a lot of boat owners who will sell their vessels. So I don’t know, it’ll be really interesting to see what happens.

Miller: You noted that fishermen are resilient and resourceful and there are other options. What might these boats be used for? I mean, do they have to be retrofitted for other fisheries or could they go out as they are now for other creatures?

Jackson: The crab industry specifically, we mostly just pot fish. It’s a gear type. So we use crab pots. There are other things we can catch with crab pots, such as pacific gray cod. Basically anything that swims or crawls in a pot we can catch, it’s just a matter of if there are seasons and how large the seasons are and how much money you can make off them. You can transfer boats into other industries, but it’s a major build out. It costs a lot of money like I said for permitting and for equipment. It’s unlikely that that would really happen. I don’t really know what a lot of these boats will do. I know that one boat that the replacement value is probably close to $10 million. I know it got put on the market for $1.5 million dollars about a week ago.

Miller: Wow. Just briefly, you said you’re gonna be in better shape than some people. What’s your plan for the next couple of years now?

Jackson: Our immediate plan is to rely more heavily on pacific gray cod. So basically, all we really have to fish is several cod fisheries throughout the state of Alaska and we will aggressively partake in all of those as much as we can.

Miller: Chuck Jackson, thanks for your time today. I appreciate it. Best of luck to you.

Jackson: Thank you very much.

Miller: That’s Chuck Jackson. Chief engineer and senior deckhand for the F/V Atlantico. He is originally from Depoe Bay. He has been a crabber and a fisherman in Alaska for decades.

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