On a cloudy January evening, just as the sun lowers in the sky creating a sliver of orange along the horizon, John Mellor pulls his boat into the dock at Fisherman’s Wharf. Mellor’s 40-foot boat has been out at sea for more than 30 hours. There is a sense of excitement and anticipation as two crew members lift a cover, unveiling thousands of crabs in a container.
Bucket by bucket, clawing crustaceans are weighed on a giant scale. The haul is a good one, which is just as well, as the success of each outing has become more crucial since the Dungeness crab season is half as long as it used to be. Mellor has waited through several anxious months of delays for the season to start.
Mellor, 60, grew up in Oakland and began fishing as a teen. He is one of a few hundred commercial Dungeness crabbers in the state who have reluctantly adapted to shorter crabbing seasons. This year, the season opened on January 18. In previous years, Dungeness season opened in mid-November in the Bay Area — in time for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, the peak season for enjoying the briny, sweet meat of the Bay Area’s most prized seafood.
Now, due to recent changes to state regulations, commercial fishers are all but giving up on the idea of selling crabs during the holidays. Compounding the problem, the crab season often doesn’t start now until January, when atmospheric rivers are common.
“By the time we hit January, it’s full-on winter storms,” Mellor said. “We’re basically making a start in the roughest part of the winter.” And, while this season’s closing date has yet to be announced, it will likely be in the spring, just as it has been the past two years.
Mellor has built a career on the water — from a start on “party” boats, to captaining his own fishing vessel, and raising a family in the East Bay along the way. But his crabbing permit is worth half of what it was when he bought it, and he does not see much future in the industry for younger generations.
“[Dungeness season is] how I managed to survive, put my kid through college, and make a living,” Mellor said, “So now that it’s a two-month crab season, it’s really scary. I can’t make enough money in two months to last the whole year.”
Your boat is your 401k
As a young man in his late teens, Mellor worked near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. He watched the fishermen, predominantly Italian guys, come in and have coffee at the docks. “They would come to the boats every day, their whole lives. I thought: ‘It must be a good way to make a living.’”
When you own a boat, and fishing is your main income, the expenses pile up persistently no matter how good the catch is at the moment. There are boat payments, repairs and maintenance, taxes, fees and permits. Mellor estimates Dungeness crabs used to make up 60% to 70% of his annual income – but that figure has been cut in half as the season has shrunk. The financial impact has made retirement a murky prospect for Mellor.
The industry is regulated by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Dungeness season has been winnowed from both ends the past few years.
While the commercial season technically runs November through June–nearly eight months– the reality is much different. State regulators can halt crabbing for a variety of reasons, from dangerously high levels of toxic algae in the water to whale migrations. Last year, the season was cut short by more than half, not opening until January and then closing in early April.
Commercial crabbers drop wire cages, or traps, sometimes hundreds of feet down to the ocean’s bottom, tied with heavy-duty ropes and a buoy that stays on the surface. Often the traps are kept out overnight or multiple days. Humpback whales, an endangered species, as well as other marine mammals and turtles occasionally get entangled in the ropes, and, in worst-case scenarios, die while struggling to free themselves.
“[Dungeness season is] how I managed to survive, put my kid through college, and make a living. So now that it’s a two-month crab season, it’s really scary. I can’t make enough money in two months to last the whole year.”
John Mellor
In the summer, or when the Dungeness season closes, Mellor fishes for sablefish and sometimes rockfish. The sablefish he catches—usually served and labeled as “black cod” or “butterfish” in many Japanese restaurants—are sold at places like Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley. Mellor also used to fish for salmon, which was completely shut down last year.
Many commercial Dungeness crabbers in the Bay Area are individuals like Mellor, who own modest-sized boats and operate with a Dungeness permit.
When Mellor started his career, all it took was a boat and fishing license to work as a commercial fisherman in the Bay Area. Eventually, as the state regulated the different fisheries more, it became necessary to have permits for each species.
He purchased his first vessel, an early 1900s wooden boat that eventually rotted, secondhand for $12,000. He bought his current boat, dubbed High Hopes, in 1998. He paid it off by going to Alaska to work during Snow Crab season, “like the ‘Deadliest Catch,’” he said, referring to the popular Discovery Channel show about the perilous industry.
Fishermen like Mellor do not typically have 401Ks or pensions. They put all of their money back into the boats and their businesses, and hope to sell or pass down their boats and licenses as assets.
“When you were ready to retire, your boat and permits were your retirement money,” said Mellor, who has been a commercial fisherman for 42 years. “You could find somebody to buy it. That’s how you could support yourself through your old age.”
Mellor had been banking on selling his Dungeness permit to use toward his retirement, but it is now worth half of what he bought it for. The math is simple – what was once an eight-month season for commercial Dungeness crabbing has been cut to just a few months.
“Basically, these permits are like a piece of real estate you can buy or sell,” he said. “That permit, before they started shortening the season, was worth between $250,000 and $300,000. Now, if I look at the brokers, I’d be lucky to get $150,000. It’s worth less than half of what it was.”
‘Gold Rush’ season
Gearing up for the crabbing season is a feat in itself. Mellor says it takes about a month or longer to get the traps and boat ready and find a crew flexible enough to be ready to go out on a boat on short notice, sometimes for more than 24 hours on the water.
Conditions vary daily, and with more extreme climate events, such as severe storms that cause huge swells and flooding, every day brings its challenges.
Luckily for Mellor, this year’s catch has been excellent. “This is some of the best fishing I’ve seen in years. There’s lots and lots of crabs and they’re huge.”
On his first haul of the season, he brought in 8,500 pounds of the prized male Dungeness (commercial crabbers are not allowed to keep female crabs, who can carry millions of eggs, leading to more crabs in the future). He sells them wholesale for $3.25 a pound off of Pier 45 in San Francisco, making him around $27,000 that day with roughly a third going to pay his crew members.
As each Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s passes, Mellors says he’s gone from anxious to nervous. “The season is never going to open before January 1st with the new rules.”
When he first reels in the pots, there’s anticipation of whether they will be filled with large male crabs or not. Every season is different. “There’s so much at stake,” he said. “It’s also exciting. It’s my favorite time of year.”
On a Friday in mid-January, Mellor and his crew of two had just come into the dock at Pier 45. It is Vy Thuc’s first season working as a crew member. A plumber by trade, Thuc is interested in learning more about being a commercial fisherman. He enjoys recreational fishing and thought he might be a good fit for the labor-intensive profession. “The work is tough. It is a physical job, but it is rewarding. I can see why John had such a love for it.”
Thuc says he understands why there’s anxiety around the delayed seasons. “I can’t imagine someone telling me the delays are this long. Living in the Bay Area is not cheap. I can’t imagine how tough it is.”
Thuc compares Dungeness season to a “gold rush” and is curious about what it’d be like to do this full-time. He also adds other crew members like himself come from other parts of the state and even other countries to work. “Me personally, I was still working. I can’t imagine not having any other payment.”
Crabbers as conservationists
Mellor was initially drawn to fishing because it brought him a sense of peace.
Growing up in Oakland in the 70s, he said he had a hard time in school and that the neighborhood was rough. He would go to the Berkeley Pier, where he found solace.
“I felt happy to be in nature. I enjoyed fishing. I felt kind of safe and I really liked it. I would go fishing every chance I got.”
Fishing was a booming industry back then and it was competitive to even find work, he said. Mellor eventually got his first fishing job in the summertime on a boat out of the Emeryville Marina. He started as a crew member of charter, also known as “party,” boats, helping customers fish for rockfish, crab, and other seafood for a day.
While he enjoys nature and animals—he says he often sees whales on his trips out to the sea—he never imagined that he’d have to become an expert on whale migration patterns.
Mellor was a member of a working group comprised of fishermen, nonprofits, government agencies and experts formed in 2015 to try and come up with a good solution to the issue of whale entanglements.
“On an individual level, it’s terrible, and we don’t want to see it,” Mellor said.
Ryan Bartling, a senior environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said that commercial crabbers have been good partners in conservation efforts.
“They have really worked collaboratively with the department, with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and with other organizations, to try new things,” Bartling said. “As a whole, they recognize that the prior 140 years–it’s not going to look like that going forward. Entanglements are a problem. There’s a sea change in understanding how big the problem is, and that they all need to contribute to help the department.”
Mellor has since left the working group, but is thinking about returning in hopes of collaborating on regulations that would work better for both crabbers and conservationists. He believes that there could be more balance, and commercial fishers are easier targets for regulation because they are all small proprietors, while it’s more difficult to impose new rules on the shipping industry, which is regulated by the federal government.
Ships struck and killed 12 whales off of the West Coast in 2023, according to NOAA, although that number is likely an undercount. A 2021 report from the Ship Strike Working Group estimates that 83 blue, fin, and humpback whales are killed along the U.S. West Coast between May and September each year. Meanwhile, NOAA recorded 30 whale entanglements caused by fishing gear off the West Coast in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Reliable data on the number of deaths caused by entanglements is not available, according to both the Department of Fish and Wildlife and NOAA.
Humpback whales have by and large increased in population since they were added to the endangered species list in 1970, though they are still protected. In a 2021 response to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the National Marine Fisheries Service declined to explore new regulations on freight ships out of the Bay Area, in part because “large whale populations off the coast of California continue to increase or remain stable despite the ongoing effects of vessel strikes.”
To be sure, fishing gear is a top contributor to whale entanglements, and the ropes from Dungeness crab traps are one of the causes. The number of entanglements along the West Coast peaked at 71 in 2016, according to NOAA. That year an algae bloom delayed the Dungeness season, pushing crabbing activity later into the year when more whales were in the area.
During the past decade, state and federal agencies have worked to improve their understanding of the whales, including their movement patterns and prey, and the activities of the fishing industry. Fishery regulators are also experimenting with reductions in the amount of gear dropped in the water and depth limitations that would allow crabbing to continue in some areas later into the season. Additionally, testing is underway on “pop-up” crab traps that sit on the ocean floor with no ropes and an electronic tracker. The crabber recovers the trap by remotely triggering an inflation device that brings it to the surface.
At the end of the day, Mellor hopes people understand how this favorite delicacy of the West Coast has impacted his life, and how much has changed, for better and worse, in his four decades working on the water.
Mellor says what he fishes for–Dungeness and sablefish–are also still some of his favorite things to eat.
Mellor will take a break from his boat this spring to attend his daughter’s graduation. He raised her mostly as a single dad since she was a teen, and she is finishing her master’s degree in mechanical engineering at UCLA.
On one Friday in January, while hauling in another 6,000 pounds of crustacean, he was proudly wearing a “UCLA Dad” shirt. Mellor never finished college—lured into the fishing industry as a young man. Now, he’s not sure if a young person today would be able to do what he did.
He plans to continue crabbing for as long as he can.
