Catching Dungeness crabs on the West Coast goes back a ways. Coast Salish tribes would wade through low tide to hunt crab, sometimes using a cedar-bark visor to fight the glare and deftly spear the prey.
Genoan immigrants during the Gold Rush brought their tradition of cioppino — a boiling pot filled with crab and the rest of the day’s catch. And generations of San Franciscans have made their holidays local and unique by feasting on “the Dungies.”
But the crab season along our stretch of coast has been delayed for the third straight year, with warmer “blobs” of ocean water likely driven by climate change, potentially deadly domoic acid, entangling lines, and a 2017 lawsuit all contributing in one year or another.
“Whale entanglements during crabbing season increased dramatically in 2016–17” and triggered a state monitoring program, Ryan Bartling, senior environment scientist of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, explained by phone.
This year, for the first time, Fish and Wildlife director Chuck Bonham also restricted the use of traps for recreational crabbing.
The vertical lines that extend from sea floor to surface could harm whales, which are migrating to breeding grounds in Mexico and Central America, as well as Western Pacific leatherback turtles.
“The program is trying to balance risk of entanglement with fishing opportunity,” Bartling said.
The restrictions have severely limited the local Dungeness catch at least into December, which is a bummer if you’re accustomed to seasonal — and reasonable — Thanksgiving crab feasts.
But as resourceful San Franciscans told us, there are still ways to put a few crabs on your table this weekend.
‘From murderers to their attorneys’
Although commercial crabbing has been delayed, it’s open season for those who don’t mind getting wet and sandy by casting a line from shore. The San Francisco mecca for all things recreational Dungie-related is Gus’ Discount Tackle, the cheery blue storefront with a giddy painted fisherman on Balboa Street in the Outer Richmond.
“Bumper to bumper every day, because you can distance,” Stephanie Ernst Scott, owner and proprietor, replies when asked about the pandemic’s effect on her business. She estimates her “newbie” business has increased by 40 percent. “People who have never done it in their life became fishermen.”
After five minutes in Gus’, as customers loiter and chat about everything from the weather to politics, it’s clear that catching Dungies is just one part of this tight-knit SF subculture.
“When people ask who is my customer base, my standard answer is ‘from murderers to their attorneys,’” says Scott. “I get soup to nuts. Any nationality, every kind of language is spoken here. Fishing is the great equalizer. They could be at war at home, but they’re not when they’re fishing.
“Crabbing is a great activity. When people ask me, ‘Am I going to catch anything?’ I say yeah, you’re going to catch fresh air and the most beautiful scenery in the world. What else do you want?”
Although her business is recreational, she feels for the commercial crabbers whose season has been delayed yet again. “One of my customers came in last night and said, ‘No pots until December.’ This will kibosh [commercial crabbers] completely.”
Sympathy for the whales?
If Gus’ Discount Tackle is ground zero for the city’s recreational crabbers, Pier 45 is the commercial hub. Unlike the tourist façade of Pier 39, Pier 45 has the fresh stink of a working pier. The seagulls scream louder, the sea breeze feels rawer, and hundreds of idle crab traps reflect the reality of local commercial crabbing, which brings in an estimated 2 million pounds of crab annually.
In his trailer office within warehouse D-5, Larry Collins, founder and president of the San Francisco Community Fishing Association, rolls his own cigarettes and tells his side of the crabbing story.
“Fish and Wildlife hasn’t done enough to protect this fleet,” Collins says. “[In 2016] you get domoic acid in the anchovy population, and the whales were eating that up and getting impaired and then tangled up in our lines.”
“I’m here to tell you: The whales are saved. We started saving them when we stopped putting harpoons in the side of them.” (The humpback whale population in the North Pacific has grown from 2,000 in the 1970s to more than 20,000 today. Some populations are no longer officially endangered species, but are still protected under federal law.)
Collins sees the ocean — and the crabs in it — as a shared resource: “The whales are a user group. We’re a user group. Now, we have a bigger impact because we’ve overrun the planet, but we need some common sense and some hard work to get Thanksgiving crab back on the table. Every American owns these crabs out here.”
The crab fleet is doing its part and has made several adaptations, according to Collins, such as neutral buoyancy lines without lead weights that can catch flippers. He wonders if the shipping industry could do more. “The ships are killing them. The shipping industry has been allowed to ‘voluntarily’ slow down. Whereas our burden to bear is losing thousands of good paying jobs and your access to your resources. That doesn’t seem fair to me.”
Around the corner from Collins is the restaurant Sabella and La Torre. Cocktail bar manager Don McFarland grew up on 46th and Ortega in the Outer Sunset, surfed Ocean Beach for years, and has a surfer’s contemplative perspective on the crab business collapse around him: “The restaurant gets crab regardless—local or not local. I was told this morning it’s going up $3 more a pound tomorrow [from Tuesday’s price of $29.95 per pound], because up north they know these guys down here aren’t opening.”
His customers don’t seem to care about the price, he says: “They’re on vacation and they came to get something specific.”
McFarland notes that this week is especially rough as he surveys his wharf neighbors, many of whom have been kneecapped by the pandemic and now the crab delay. “When we were all open, Thanksgiving day alone, we’re all ordering 500 to 800 pounds a day to sell. People come in and say, ‘I want five [pounds]! I want eight!’”
Get ’em off the boat
It’s impossible to talk about San Francisco Dungeness crab without mentioning the Alioto family. (The URL of its online store says it all.) In real life, its store is just steps away from Sabella and La Torre and shares the neighborly quaintness of Gus’, with cartoonish crabs happy to be caught and enormous tanks of live Dungies. (They’re all already spoken for, to one customer’s disappointment.)
Angela “Angel” Cincotta, a family executive who works the counter and has cracked and sold crab for decades, questions the state’s new regulations, asserting that you can’t get all species “up to optimum levels.”
“That’s not the way God planned it,” she says, adding that state wildlife officials are playing politics. When asked how much Dungies are going for, Cincotta waves her hand and says the prices are changing “every 30 minutes.”
“It’s ridiculous,” she observes, and reports that customers are starting to push back.
(At last check, one day before Thanksgiving, online orders for overnight shipping started at two crabs for $180 and went up to 12 for $575.)
So, what about the new law that lets crabbers sell right from their boats? No problem, according to Cincotta (actually, she says “God bless them”) — as long as inspectors “double- and triple-check” that they’re following health codes.
The shore view
The steady breeze on San Francisco’s small and secluded China Beach quickly blows away any traces of the commercial angst and political grumbling left over from Pier 45. For the half-dozen crabbers with their long poles dug into the sand on a recent afternoon, the sweeping view of the Marin Headlands and the Golden Gate Bridge is just another backdrop. They are focused on crab.
I like to boil it for 15 minutes, eat it with mayonnaise and rice. Like a crab salad.
Mike Meneses of Daly City
“The pandemic got me back into it,” says Mike Meneses of Daly City. “It had been 20 or 30 years since I had gone crabbing. I went right to Stephanie at Gus’ and got set up.”
Does he catch Dungies for fun or for food? “A little of both. I like to boil it for 15 minutes. My dad makes a great vinegar, pepper, salt, garlic dip. I like to eat it with mayonnaise and rice. Like a crab salad.”
His friend has one Dungie in the bucket, but Meneses says he might throw it back if he doesn’t catch another. “One isn’t going to feed a family,” he says with a laugh. “One’s a tease!”
On the other side of the boulder that splits the beach in half, Jeff Lin of San Francisco and his family take recreational crabbing to the next level. He and his wife row an inflatable kayak past the first wave of breakers, then drop a weighted hoop net with bait, which settles roughly 15 feet to the sandy bottom.
The trap will lie flat, secured by a rope to a buoy, which allows crabs to come and go, unlike a cage that can be left overnight or for days. (Hoop nets are still allowed because they’re defined as “active fishing” by Fish and Wildlife.)
The Lins are in full wetsuits, and their children play on a blanket with toy shovels and buckets at the ready.
“I brought my cage here last week,” Lin admits. “I was not aware of the new regulations. I was setting up, and one of the regulars came by and said, ‘Hey have you heard about the new regulations?’ I said no, so I looked it up. I left the cage on shore.”
East of China Beach, Baker Beach is wider and wilder (some of it clothing optional), and with more crabbers. The new regulations have forced crab fanatic Jesse Salera of Pittsburg to move from ship to shore. “I used to go on charter boats,” says Salera, and could catch up to 10 crabs per outing. “But the whales and turtles are getting entangled.”
Casting from the beach, Salera stuffs the small bait box attached to his pole with squid, making sure the six small hoops that will (hopefully) snare a crab leg are disentangled. He casts the box past the first set of breakers.
The suggestion of catching 10 from shore makes Salera laugh. “That would be epic! I don’t need no charter boat if I could catch 10 crabs here. And I would save a lot of money without needing the charter boat.”
Salera checks his line. He slips his 12-foot pole out of its cradle and gives a good pull, then reels in at a steady pace, hoping one of the six snares on the bait box has done its job.
There’s a flash of red in the surf and, sure enough, Salera reels in his first Dungeness of the day. He measures; it’s 5 and 3/4 inches. A keeper.