Into the ice: Follow a crab boat’s quest for snow crab in a Bering Sea that has been upended by climate change.
ABOARD THE PINNACLE, Bering Sea — Through the wheelhouse window, captain Mark Casto spotted a white line on the horizon. The edge of an ice floe was illuminated by bow lights piercing the morning darkness of the Bering Sea.
Casto grabbed a microphone to relay a change in plans to the deck crew. Pull the pots up and stack them aboard. They would search for crab somewhere else. The winter ice is a key ally to the snow crab. It helps in the growth of algae at the base of the food chain, and is vital to the formation of a vast cold pool at the sea bottom that acts as a safe haven for snow crab to escape predators who prefer warmer temperatures.
The 2022 snow crab harvest began under much colder conditions as crews in January went north in search of the biggest males preferred by processors. The ice formed early and threatened to close off the open water in some of the best crabbing areas.But for him and many crabbers, the winter ice also was a welcome sight, a tangible sign of hope for at least a short-term resurgence in the snow crab populations and the fishery they sustain.The crew of the Pinnacle rigs crab pots on Jan.
The Pinnacle left Seattle on Jan. 5, traveling more than 2,000 miles during a 9-day voyage to reach the Aleutian port of Dutch Harbor, where the crew loaded water and other supplies but, to keep COVID-19 at bay, forfeited the traditional dinners at The Chart Room. Mark Casto, along with his younger brother, Glenn, had free rein to roam their father’s boat, the Westward Wind. They learned how to crab, endlessly practicing throwing grappling hooks and coiling lines.
Casto has thrived in a crab fleet that has gone through huge changes, booming in the late 20th century to more than 250 boats then contracting in recent years to fewer than 70. Under the new system, Casto knows at the start of the season just how many pounds he can catch. He can wait out a storm without worrying about losing crab to bolder captains.
The second floor has bunk rooms, with big flat-screen monitors for movies, and a washing machine and showers with plenty of hot water. Grant says Casto is willing to make the investments needed to maintain the Pinnacle, and that has kept Grant coming back each season, where he joins a veteran crew. During the show’s early years, a series producer visited the Pinnacle and — after reviewing a video Grant made of harvest operations — didn’t offer to put the Pinnacle on the show, according to Grant and Casto. They say the producer concluded the boat, with its protective shelter deck and no-drama crew, would not make good television.
Casto’s two sons have opted for careers in fashion photography and teaching, so the bushy-bearded Bunnell represents the next generation of Pinnacle crabbers — “generation kick-ass,” he declared in response to taunts from other crew while they rigged pots. “In the future, I’d like to be in the wheelhouse,” he said. “That’s where I have my goal set. But if there’s no crab to catch, then I will never be a skipper.”On the deck of the Pinnacle, the crew unfolded two large blue tarps. They lashed the first to the front of the stack of pots that — with the aid of a crane — had been brought aboard from Captains Bay dock. The second one was strapped around the starboard side.
The latest fatal sinking was the Scandies Rose, which took on ice before going down Dec. 31, 2019, in the Gulf of Alaska, killing five crew. A short distance from land, Casto left the helm, exited a nearby door, and walked onto a narrow, high catwalk for a brief ritual with which he begins each crab season.
Crewman Jerret Kummer removes a tarp from a stack of crab pots aboard the Pinnacle on Jan. 18 in the Bering Sea southwest of St. Matthew Island. The tarp, which was brand new at the beginning of the voyage three days prior, keeps freezing spray from forming ice within the stack of crab pots. Ice buildup can add significant weight to a boat, changing its stability and increasing the risk of capsizing.
Crewman Jack Bunnell, left, uses a jackhammer to clear ice from the bow of the Pinnacle, as his fellow crewman Dan Jacobson shovels the ice chunks overboard on Jan. 19. But these pots were outfitted with “trigger” openings designed to keep out most crab and allow the entry of Pacific cod, fat-bellied gray fish, many of which weigh 15 to 20 pounds. Some cod flopped about as they got tossed in totes. Others lay still, done in by pressure changes that caused their stomachs to be pushed out of their mouths during the rapid ascent.
The cod’s ability to find all these snow crab is linked to the retreat of the winter ice as the ocean went through a period of rapid warming. In the summer of 2018, the first of the two years of extreme warming, the cold pool covered just 2% of that sea bottom, according to Lyle Britt, a Seattle-based federal marine biologist. Last summer, even after a modest boost in the winter ice pack, the cold pool had expanded only to about 12%.
The crew of the Pinnacle unload a crab pot on Jan. 24. Each pot is large enough to hold over 1,000 crab, but catches of that size are no longer common. Overall, population models indicate that between the 2019 and 2021 surveys, at least 1.8 billion snow crab vanished, according to Ben Daly, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist.
Grant inspected a line connected to the knuckle of the crane. It was a milky white, a sign that water had leaked into the hydraulic fluid. He checked a tank that held the fluid, and it, too, was discolored. “Once you get outside the box this year, it feels like you don’t get anything — it’s either good or bad,” Casto said.
“We’re fishing on the boneyard,” Casto said. He told the crew to pick up those pots so they could be set somewhere else.Biologists are unsure just how many discarded crab end up dying from the rigors of their trip to the surface. They assume a 30% mortality rate, and a higher toll in colder weather. Many boats continued to crab in the southern zone. Some skippers brought on board pots stuffed with crab, then sent lots of them back into the sea because they were small, or were older, with dark, discolored shells and legs. Most would have been legal to retain, and fine to eat. But they were not preferred by processors and their customers seeking to market bigger crab with unblemished shells.
Then in the winter of 2021, crews in the southern harvest grounds found the crab had largely disappeared. By the time the 2021 season closed, more than 90% of the snow crab was caught in the north, and discards had dropped back almost to 2013 levels.“Why did people stay down there? … We were our own worst enemy.”Engineer Mike Grant reached into a cupboard for Advil to ease his back pain and reduce the swelling in his hands.“I want to go back to bed,” said Jamieson, who had just finished a four-hour sleep break.
Meals came at nearly any hour of the day — whenever someone had the time and energy to cook. On a few occasions, the crew dined on their catch — grilled cod salvaged from the bait bin, and omelets filled with fresh-picked crab. “You just have to be ready to jump out of the way. It’s like second nature after all these years,” said Jamieson, a 16-year veteran of the boat.
The route to St. Paul took the Pinnacle east of the Zhemchug Canyon, an undersea gorge — deeper than the Grand Canyon — that drops from the southern Bering Sea shelf to the depths of the Aleutian Basin. He hoped the area could be left alone to recover. Checking his computer screen, Casto was not happy to find seven bottom trawlers, which tow nets through the sea to bring in yellowfin sole and other fish.The trawlers have become a flash point in an often emotional debate about the fate of the snow crab.
“It’s kind of a hairball,” said Ben Daly, an Alaska Fish and Game research biologist. “The crab numbers coming up in the nets are very low. But that doesn’t mean that the nets are not dragging around and crushing crab and disturbing habitat.” They also push back at the crab fleet’s conservation record, which includes discarding snow crab that don’t meet the market size or have too many cosmetic imperfections. They note that during the past half-decade, the crab fleets’ discards are estimated to have killed far more crab than those that died from getting scooped up in trawl nets.
“We all need to work together to figure out what’s going on. If we get shut down next year, are they just going to keep fishing and killing crab?” he said. Still, he worried about the safety of other crabbers who had yet to get their quotas, some of whom were moored off the island, bobbing in the swells as they waited for a break in the weather to head north into the ice.
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