It was a calm January morning, the waters off Bodega Bay unusually smooth, but crab fisherman Dick Ogg couldn’t shake a grim feeling that the day wouldn’t go his way.

The Dungeness crab season had opened just a few weeks earlier — two months behind schedule — and was off to a slow start. “We’re working very hard to basically get nothing,” said Ogg.

The anemic hauls so early in the season mark the latest setback for California’s commercial Dungeness crab fishery, a roughly $45-million-a-year industry that delivers one of the state’s most iconic culinary delights.

The industry’s future has been complicated by another celebrated sea creature: Each year, a number of humpback whales migrating through California’s waters to and from tropical breeding grounds get entangled in commercial crab fishing gear, encounters that often end in mutilation or death. State regulators are intent on lowering the chances of whales coming into contact with the gear.

There’s reason to be concerned.

Since 1970, when the federal government listed humpback whales as “endangered” after they were hunted to near extinction, the population has made a fragile comeback. Whales along the West Coast have recovered at an estimated annual rate of 8.2% since the 1980s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with more than 4,500 humpback whales now feeding off California’s coast.

The state Department of Fish and Wildlife has imposed sharp restrictions on the crab industry over the last decade in an effort to protect that progress, as well as to safeguard populations of blue whales, gray whales and the critically endangered leatherback sea turtle.

The annual crab season — which historically ran from late fall to midsummer — has been repeatedly truncated, due to both whale safety concerns and elevated levels of domoic acid, a toxin that builds up in shellfish. This year’s season opened after New Year’s and is likely to end in spring. The shortened timeline gives whales more time to migrate without risk of entanglement, but has cut California’s commercial crabbers out of the lucrative Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s markets, devastating the fleet’s income expectations.

In addition, most of the California crab fleet is under a mandatory order this year to use 50% less gear, meaning the fleet has fewer weeks to fish and can use just a fraction of its traps. And the weeks that are open to crabbing pose some of the most dangerous wind and weather conditions of the season.

“We’ve had times we shouldn’t be out,” said Ogg, 71. “We have to go. We don’t have a choice.”

After making what feels like one concession after the next, he wonders whether the fishery can survive any more changes.

And now the crabs aren’t biting.

Early on a Thursday in late January, Ogg readied his 54-foot fiberglass boat, the Karen Jeanne, for a 16-hour day of hauling 200 crab pots. It was barely 4:30 a.m. at the Spud Point Marina, and Ogg’s crew, Bradlee Titus, 34, and Axel Bjorklund, 22, both multi-generational fishermen, prepared the deck by washing equipment, filling water buckets and packing jars with bait — a stinky, oily mashup of mackerel and squid.

At the helm, Ogg tracked water currents and the weather forecast as he moved the boat out of Bodega Bay, past Point Reyes toward the Farallon Islands and San Francisco skyline.

Ogg was adopted from Japan, and has lived most of his life near Bodega Bay along the Sonoma County coast. He didn’t start out in commercial fishing, but eased into it about 25 years ago, after more than three decades working as an electrician at Sonoma State University.

Crab pots sit on the ocean floor, with more than 200 feet of rope attaching them to buoys at the surface. A bait jar inside the pot tempts the crab into a one-way entrance.

Titus and Bjorklund move in a choreographed dance to haul in the crabs using a process that takes about one minute and 30 seconds per pot: Grab the buoy and attach the rope to a crab hauler; raise the 100-pound pot out of the water; empty the crabs into a holding tank; replace the old bait with a fresh jar; toss the female and small crabs back overboard; and throw the larger males into the tank. Then they push the empty pot back into the water and begin the process again.

The cycle repeats itself hour after hour, a meditation in back-breaking labor, as Ogg navigates through his lines of crab pots. On this day, each pot would yield eight to 12 crabs, a small harvest compared with the dozens of crabs the pots are built to hold. After throwing out the “shorts” and females, they’re lucky to keep two. The team stays focused, but it’s easy to see the disappointment.

“We’re going backwards,” Bjorklund yelled at one point.

Ogg, at the wheel, shook his head. “On this particular trip, I won’t make any money,” he said. The bait alone tallies around $1,200 each trip, on top of fuel costs and upkeep. The one bright spot was that the fleet had negotiated a relatively high price of $7.25 per pound with buyers, meaning even for a low-volume trip he might break even.

Ogg has come to accept the shortened season. He’s cut the number of pots he puts in the water in compliance with state rules. He’s bracing to spend up to $20,000 on fishing lines next season in preparation for new state rules requiring the fishery to use a specific color of rope, in an effort to better identify what gear is entangling the whales.

“We’ve adjusted almost as much as we possibly can,” he said.

He serves on a dozen state and regional committees focused on the Dungeness crab industry. This year, he hopes to be added to a new federal task force set up to find solutions to whale entanglement. Crabbers hope the federal government will relax some regulations, but there’s a chance the task force just adds more.

“They want zero entanglements,” Ogg said. “And zero is not an achievable number.”

There were 34 whale entanglements, including 29 humpbacks, recorded off the Pacific coast in 2024, a six-year high, according to preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Twenty-seven whales were reported entangled in 2023 and 30 whales in 2022, which environmental groups say is probably an undercount. It’s an improvement from years past; in 2016, 71 whale entanglements were reported off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California, prompting conservationists to file a lawsuit against California. The settlement agreement led to many of the current regulations.

Commercial Dungeness crab gear has contributed to an annual average of 5.2 humpback entanglements since 2014, according to national and state data, more than double what federal rules allow.

Nancy Black, a marine biologist and owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, is in the camp that wants to see the number of entanglements cut to zero. “I don’t think any of them should be entangled at all,” she said.

Black has seen a steady increase in the humpback whale population in recent decades, and wants to see even greater efforts to reduce run-ins with the crab fishery. She partners with other scientists to report whale entanglements, so rescue teams can be dispatched to save the animals.

“It’s really distressing,” she said. “Especially if you see one that has had it on for a long time, or it’s cutting through its body or it’s wrapped around its mouth.”

Lisa Damrosch, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, noted that the industry is inherently unpredictable.

“The weather, a wild, natural product that you’re not planting or watering or controlling,” said Damrosch, whose family has fished out of Half Moon Bay for over 100 years. “Now we’re adding whales, which are also unpredictable and not something we can control as human beings.”

In a few weeks, whales could return to California waters, potentially bringing the crab season to a halt.

But Stephen Melz will still be fishing.

Melz lives in Half Moon Bay, and has been commercially fishing for nearly four decades. For the last two years, he’s participated in a pilot program testing pop-up crab gear.

While traditional crab gear uses vertical lines to connect the pots to buoys at the surface, pop-up gear keeps the rope and a flotation device on the ocean floor with the trap. To retrieve the pot, Melz uses an app on his phone that sends an acoustic signal to the trap that releases the rope and buoy, sending them back to the surface.

“It sounded like science fiction to me, but this stuff actually works,” said Geoff Shester, California campaign director and scientist at Oceana.

Shester promotes pop-up gear as an alternative to vertical ropes, a shift he believes could protect whales and still establish some stability for crab fishers. The pop-up gear helped bring in 229,000 pounds of crab during the 2024 spring fishery, according to Oceana, “worth $1.5 million, with high reliability and minimal gear loss.”

Many fishermen, including Ogg, remain skeptical. They’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in their traditional equipment, and don’t trust the pop-up gear success rates touted by environmental organizations.

Melz agrees that traditional gear is far easier to use at the start of the season, when fleets are navigating choppy waters. But in spring, when conditions are more favorable, the pop-up gear is a great option, he said.

The morning after Ogg’s long day of pulling pots, he takes his boat to a seafood wholesaler in Bodega Bay to offload his crabs.

“This might be the smallest load I’ve ever brought in,” Ogg said. “If we have 1,000 pounds, I’d just go nuts.”

“I’m guessing we have 750,” Titus responded.

As they worked, Ogg flipped through his iPad, pulling up photos from prior seasons. At the start of the 2017 season, the boat’s tank nearly overflowed with crab, netting about $30,000 from one day on the water, even at a wholesale price significantly lower than $7.25 per pound.

The crabs were lifted off the boat and weighed: 855 pounds of fresh crab meat. Gross earnings: $6,200. After paying the crew and the costs of fuel and bait, Ogg would net about $2,000.

Worse than usual. Better than expected. The best part was he didn’t see any whales.

Distributed by Tribune News Service