An eerie stillness looms over unused boats and impromptu graveyards of empty crab traps at Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay, a place typically alive with activity at this time of year. Without the usual income from the Dungeness crab season that supports his family, Don Marshall, along with many other fishermen around the Bay, wonders how he will make ends meet.
“If you had asked me six months ago about crab, I would’ve told you we’re going to feed our families, we’re going to send our kids to college. And I’m not talking just the junior college. If they want to go to Princeton, crab can make this happen with my work ethic,” said Marshall, who recently took out a loan to buy the permit for his new boat, the F/V Janet E. Donald. “This [situation] is a new one. This was like getting the legs pulled out from under you.”
The Dungeness crab fishery was closed until further notice on Nov. 6, one week before the commercial fishery was scheduled to open. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife made the emergency decision after the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and the California Department of Public Health established Dungeness crab unsafe to eat due to dangerously high levels of a neurotoxin called domoic acid.
The closure that is devastating fishermen is caused by microscopic algae within a harmful algal bloom off the California coast. El Niño and a warm water mass scientists nicknamed “the blob” are partially to blame for the higher than average water temperatures that have brought on the bloom, according to Raphael Kudela, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz whose lab models the bloom.
Read the full story at Peninsula Press >>
Read more about California Dungeness >>
