New focus on safety means fewer crabbing jobs

Unless his body wore out, 38-year-old Sean Dunlop of Edmonds thought he could always find work as a crewman in the nation's most-dangerous seafood harvest: crabbing off Alaska.

But this fall, Dunlop is out of a job, a casualty of sweeping changes in Alaska's crab-fishing industry that divide up the harvest among vessel owners before they go out to sea.

The goal is to create a safer, less-wasteful and more profitable harvest, where it will no longer be necessary to work through the night in fierce competition to grab as much crab as possible before the season shuts down.

Under this new system, the crab fleet is shrinking dramatically. In the Bristol Bay king-crab harvest that begins Saturday, only 103 vessels have registered to participate, down from the 252 that joined in last year's three-day season.

That's left Dunlop and more than 700 other crew who once risked their lives in pursuit of king and snow crab looking for other work.

In Ballard and other home ports for the crab fleet, the sudden surge in unemployment has stoked controversy about how this lucrative public resource has been divvied up.

Under an allocation approved by a federal fishery council, vessel owners are the clear winners: They hold harvest rights to 97 percent of the crab. Only 3 percent of these rights went to skippers, and nothing to crew members.

The vessel owners who caught the most crab in years past received the biggest shares. These shares translate into a fixed number of pounds that can be claimed year after year on the crabbing grounds.

The shares also can be sold like stock to the highest bidder. Or they can be leased out, an option that has created a new class of shore-side crabbers who have no need to send a vessel to sea to earn money.

Dunlop and two of his unemployed buddies, George Adair and Brett Wilson, have collectively worked more than 45 seasons on crab boats. They believe that labor should have earned them at least a small share of the crab catch to help ease their exit from the fleet.

"I was just devastated when I got the news that I didn't have my job," said Dunlop, who first went fishing as a teenager right out of high school. "I put my whole life into this, thinking that one day I might work my way up to the [skipper's] wheelhouse."

Vessel owners say they are the ones who sustain the industry, making the risky, multimillion-dollar investments that bankroll the fleet. And it would be very complicated to figure out a fair and accurate way to give shares to crew, many of whom depend on crabbing only for part-time work.

"It's a sensitive issue. There's arguments on both sides," said Kevin Kaldestad, whose family operates nine crab vessels known as the Mariner fleet, which will claim one of the largest shares of the crab harvest.

No more "mad rush"

For crabbers, the changes represent a dramatic turning point in an industry formed more than 50 years ago by some of the toughest fishermen in North America. Many of these pioneers sailed out of Ballard, prospecting the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea with baited steel traps called pots.

Spurred by competition for the lucrative shellfish, they adopted a brutal work pace, barely sleeping for days on end so they could claim as much crab as possible before managers declared an end to the harvest.

In peak years, which lasted through the early 1990s, the Bering Sea often yielded more than $250 million worth of king and snow crab annually, making millionaires of successful boat owners. Deck hands, who are typically paid a percentage of their vessel's profits, might earn $40,000 to more than $100,000 for several months of Bering Sea duty.

During the past decade, king and snow-crab harvests have declined. Fleetwide earnings last year fell to less than $150 million. Kris Poulsen, a major vessel owner, said he found crabbing to be a largely break-even proposition in recent years. And for many crew, it became a part-time job, with the season in recent years often measured in days and pay that typically ranged from $15,000 to $30,000.

Crews still faced big risks.

Crab vessels — their decks loaded with top-heavy pots — have sunk as they slogged through waves the size of three-story buildings. They have capsized from the weight of ice that built up from the freezing spray. In the exhaustion of marathon work stints, crew have sometimes been crushed by gear or lost overboard.

One federal study of 61 Alaska crabber deaths in a five-year period ending in 1996 concluded that the crew death rate was 50 times higher than the national occupational death rate.

"I lost count of the people I know who died," Adair said. "There was at least five personal friends, like my buddy — we called him Mongo — who got on the wrong side of a pot. It thumped him right over the side."

Under the new system, vessel owners say, their crews can take fewer risks since there's a guarantee of a fixed share of the harvest, no matter how fast they work.

If a big storm is brewing, the crew can stay in port rather than head out to the open sea. If the crew wants to catch some shut-eye, rather than pushing through the night, they can sleep without losing crab to another vessel.

"There's no pressure to go for it, and no mad rush," said Kaldestad, of the Mariner fleet. "And the guys that remain [crabbing] will have good, more-stable jobs."

Kaldestad, like most of the biggest quota holders, has deep roots in the crabbing industry, working on his father's vessels before taking his place onshore in the family business. Over the years, Kaldestad has earned a reputation as a skilled operator, with top-of-the-line vessels and some of the most-experienced skippers and crew.

He also suffered tragedy in 1995 when his Northwest Mariner ship sank, claiming the lives of five crew members and the skipper.

Kaldestad said that the improved safety will be the biggest benefit of the new system.

The changes also may help conservation.

In the rushed harvests of years past, crews tossed overboard millions of undersized crab, many of which did not survive. As the harvests slow down, the pots can stay longer on the bottom. That will give undersized crab more time to crawl out through specially sized openings, and their greater survival could help populations rebound.

Bigger crab populations would boost the already-considerable value of the harvest shares.

The upcoming king-crab harvest, which is regulated by Alaska's Department of Fish and Game, is expected to be the best since 1990.

Crabbers will be allowed to take up to 18.3 million pounds of red king crab in the October season, compared with 15.2 million pounds last year. They will be allowed to take more than 37.2 million pounds of snow crab later this winter, nearly double last year's haul.

According to a Seattle Times analysis of federal quota records, the Mariner fleet operated by the Kaldestad family will claim a 5.5 percent share of all future red-king-crab harvests, and 4.7 percent of the snow-crab harvests.

If sold, those shares would have a combined market value of more than $33 million, according to an estimate provided by Dock Street Brokers, a Ballard-based company that brokers sales of crab quota.

Crew left out in cold

So far, North Pacific crab is among a handful of U.S. fisheries that have converted to the new shares system.

As the push to change has increased, the debate has intensified over who deserves a share of the catch.

One option largely opposed by the fishing industry would authorize federal officials to auction off shares to the highest bidder — much like the Forest Service auctions off timber.

In a 1999 study titled "Sharing the Harvest," a National Academy of Sciences panel suggested that crew members also should be considered for shares along with vessel owners, in order to help achieve a goal in the federal fisheries law requiring that the interests of all parties be considered in any changes.

The study recognized that the crew assumed the physical risks of the fishery and also took financial risks, since their pay depended on the size of the catch.

Even if crews don't end up with shares, the academy panel said, they should be considered "stakeholders" and given a voice in crafting the plan.

But the 14-person committee that drafted a North Pacific crab plan contained only processing-company officials, vessel owners and one skipper.

In 2002, that committee came up with a proposal to allocate up to 20 percent of the quota to skippers and/or crew.

Then the plan was finalized by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is composed of industry, state and federal officials. The council gave skippers 3 percent of the harvest, with the rest going to vessel owners. Crew members were left out.

"We were fighting for table scraps," said Tom Suryan, the skipper who served on the crab committee.

Crewmen Adair, Dunlop and Wilson say they didn't pay much attention to the council process because they always figured that no matter what the harvest system, they could keep their jobs on crab boats. And they still are hoping for a last-minute call that would put them on a boat headed north to Bristol Bay.

But their hopes are fading. They are resigning themselves to carpentry and other jobs while others pull in the crab.

"For us, this is the deadliest season," Dunlop said. "Because there is no season."

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com. Staff reporter Justin Mayo contributed to this story.