Saving Seafood

Judge grants preliminary approval for a USD 2.25 million settlement over Dungeness crab price-fixing

August 26, 2026 — A U.S. federal court judge has granted preliminary approval on a settlement for a price-fixing lawsuit leveled against buyers of Dungeness crab in California, Washington, and Oregon.

Northern District of California Judge Alex G. Tse approved three settlements in the lawsuit, which was brought by Brand Little and Robin Burns. Tse approved a collective payment of USD 2.25 million (EUR 1.93 million) from three of the smaller crab buyers, who shared 5.27 percent of the Dungeness crab market during the period: Pacific Dream Seafood, Caito Seafood, and Fisherman’s Choice.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

OREGON: Oregon crabbers face new requirements

August 21, 2026 — Oregon commercial Dungeness crab fishermen will face new electronic monitoring requirements beginning Feb. 1 as state officials work to reduce the risk of whale entanglements.

The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission approved rules Friday requiring commercial crab vessels to use electronic monitoring systems that track vessel locations and record when fishermen pull crab pots. Other rules regarding permits for experimental fishing gear were also approved and took effect immediately.

Justin Ainsworth, Marine Resources Program Manager with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the system will have two main components: a GPS device and a hydraulic pressure sensor.

The GPS device will track a vessel’s location, while the hydraulic pressure sensor will detect when a vessel is using its hydraulic system to pull up a crab pot.

Read the full article at KVAL

OREGON: Oregon to start testing ropeless crabbing gear next spring to stop whale entanglements

August 19, 2026 — Oregon fishermen will begin testing ropeless crabbing technology next spring in an effort to save whales from often-fatal entanglements.

The state since 2021 has taken steps to reduce whale entanglements, including requiring additional late season crabbing tags and limiting how many crabbing pots fishermen can use and how deep they can place them, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Marine Resources Program Manager Justin Ainsworth told the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission in a meeting Friday.

But with whale entanglements increasing, commissioners are turning to two new tools to reduce whale deaths. Rules the commission adopted Friday will require fishermen to share their vessel location with state fishery managers and allow them to test ropeless crabbing gear already allowed in California.

Traditional commercial crabbing gear requires hundreds of traps to sit on the ocean floor, each attached to a vertical line connected to a buoy on the surface. Whales can easily get entangled and injured, often fatally, in those lines, as was the case with a humpback whale freed about 20 miles off the Oregon Coast in late July that wasn’t expected to survive because the entanglement left it unable to feed.

The pop-up gear the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife can begin authorizing as soon as spring 2027, however, stores the rope and buoy with the trap on the seafloor. Fishermen can set a timer or trigger a release mechanism that allows the line to uncoil and buoy to surface to retrieve the catch, ensuring whales and other creatures have a clear path most of the time.

Pop-up gear is currently unlawful because all pot and trap gear must be marked at the surface with a buoy. The proposed rule would allow the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to issue some experimental fishing gear permits as soon as spring 2027, and the commission could consider wider authorization if the tests prove effective.

Read the full article at the Astorian 

OREGON: Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission approves new rules for Dungeness crab fisheries

August 18, 2026 — The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission approved new rules for Oregon’s commercial Dungeness crab fisheries during a meeting Friday, Aug. 14, with changes aimed in part at reducing whale entanglements.

The new rules include updates involving experimental gear, such as pop-up crab gear designed to reduce the amount of line in the water, as well as surface gear, including buoys and lines at the water’s surface.

Read the full article at KATU

OREGON: Oregon approves electronic monitoring system for Dungeness crab vessels

August 18, 2026 — During an 14 August board meeting, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) unanimously voted to pass electronic vessel monitoring requirements for the state’s Dungeness crab operations, aiming to reduce the risk of whale entanglement.

ODFW said in a release that each commercial crab vessel in the state’s Dungeness fishery must now install an electronic vessel monitoring system by 1 February 2027. Original legislation required the installation two months earlier, but upon listening to public feedback, the commission pushed back the deadline to next year.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

OREGON: ODFW Commission revises Dungeness crab fishery rules to address whale entanglements

August 17, 2026 — On Friday, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission revised rules to strengthen the department’s efforts to reducing whale entanglements in Oregon’s Dungeness crab fishery.

The revised rules include electronic vessel monitoring, including the installation of devices that provide a vessel’s location and other data. This requirement will take effect in February 2027.

The Commission also established additional criteria and guidelines for approving experimental fishing gear permits, allowing the exploration of alternative gear for the crab fishery that needs to be tested off the Oregon coast.

Read the full article at OPB

Kelp’s crisis is the fleet’s crisis

August 11, 2026 — Kelp forests in the United States are under threat and are facing the same stresses as the commercial fisheries that work around them. The Forest of the Sea by David Helvarg, published in May, tells the story of kelp, the importance of healthy kelp forests, and the challenges these habitats face. While this book is not about commercial fishing, it does include fishermen, and its insights are vital to those who make a living harvesting wild fish from a rapidly changing sea.

Kelp forests have evolved as the anchor habitat for nearshore ecosystems in the cold waters of temperate climes across the globe. Helvarg dives into the ecological and economic importance of kelp forests, and how they’re under threat as waters warm and other environmental stressors diminish their footprint, often drastically so.

As a commercial fisherman on the West Coast and as a journalist covering fisheries and oceans for more than 15 years, the health of fisheries and the health of kelp forests have mirrored each other from my vantage point. Since the Blob, the extreme marine heatwave that hit the West Coast from 2014-2016, whale entanglements ravaged the California Dungeness crab fishery while 90 percent of the Northern California kelp forests disappeared. This isn’t a situation where one affects the other, but parallel plot lines in the same story.

Helvarg, a veteran journalist who also serves as the executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean advocacy NGO, uses Fort Bragg, Calif., as an example of just this. The shoreline of the small city nearly 200 miles north of San Francisco has historically been dominated by thick kelp forests teeming with life. It has also been an important commercial fishing port for Dungeness crab, salmon, and groundfish.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

OREGON: Port Orford wants to become a South Coast seafood hub. Here’s what comes next

August 10, 2026 — The Port of Port Orford is laying the groundwork for several projects aimed at moving it closer to its long-term goal of becoming a South Coast seafood hub.

The work includes a $500,000 system to bring seawater onto the dock for live seafood, a federal study of the port’s electricity use and an engineering review of the hillside above the only road serving the waterfront.

Port officials and contractors outlined the projects during an Aug. 4 town hall.

Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, is funding the seawater project.

Seafood buyers currently lower their own pumps into the ocean to fill tanks for live fish and crab. Port officials say a permanent system would make that process more reliable and help fishermen maintain access to higher-value markets.

Philip Russom, a commercial fisherman and port tenant, said seawater access is particularly important for the local fishery.

“Rockfish is one of our main staples, and it’s one of our live products that we need the seawater system to be able to maintain our markets for,” Russom said.

Portland-based NWR Construction is designing the system. The contractor expects to have a firm design by the end of September and hopes to have the system operating by summer 2027. The project will require permits from several state and federal agencies to draw water from the ocean and return it.

Read the full article at OPB

WASHINGTON: Commercial and recreational Dungeness crabbers tussle over finite resource

August 10, 2026 — As long as crabbers and state officials can remember, Puget Sound’s Dungeness crab season is nothing short of an ordeal. As tribal commercial, state commercial and recreational crabbers divvy up a finite resource, no one is 100% satisfied with harvest shares, enforcement or scheduling.

Hank Vanderhage, the president of Bellingham Puget Sound Anglers, an organization of recreational fishers and crabbers, said recreational crabbers are at the center of the discontent due to timing, harvest habits and their reporting — or lack of — to the state.

“There is a real tension between recreational and everybody else,” he said.

Tribes have long scrutinized recreational crabbers’ record of low catch-reporting rates; in 2024, only 43% of recreational crabbers reported their catch, leaving their impact on the population uncertain. By law, tribes and nontribal communities in the states split the available harvest 50/50, a ratio established in long-held treaties and upheld in state and federal court cases after the “fish wars” of the 1960s and 1970s.

The number of Dungeness crabs available for harvest is agreed on each year between tribes and the state.

The agreed-upon harvest right is then split equally between tribes and others. The state portion is further divided between recreational and commercial fishers. All three groups are required to report their harvest on a catch reporting card (CRC), tracking what each caught, where and when.

Read the full article at Cascadia Daily News

Fishing Vessel Joins Trained Team to Free Injured Humpback Whale 20 Miles off Oregon Coast

August 4, 2026 — An Oregon team joined by experts from Washington and a local fisherman freed a severely entangled humpback whale about 20 miles off the Oregon Coast on July 26. While the team removed all of the gear from the whale, the entanglement left the young whale’s jaw permanently open, leaving it unable to feed and unlikely to survive.

Oregon State University research assistant Craig Hayslip spotted the whale from a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter surveying the coast for whales and fishing gear three days earlier. He reported the whale anchored by heavy fishing gear to NOAA’s West Coast Entanglement Hotline, which activates trained responders across the region.

Responders asked local fisherman Poggy Lapham to join the effort and help lift the gear with the hydraulic winch on his boat, F/V Michele Ann. That gave responders access to free the whale from the gear. An online photo catalog identified the whale as a young humpback previously sighted in British Columbia in 2024.

The fishing vessel recovered a tangle of more than 3,000 feet of line, five sablefish pots, and individual commercial Dungeness crab traps from Oregon and Washington. Responders and the fishermen worked together to analyze the gear and evaluate the entanglement. The condition of the gear indicated that it could be derelict or lost gear. NOAA Fisheries is following up with gear owners for more details.

Lapham said the entanglement should be a wake-up call for the fishing industry to ask, “How can we better incentivize gear retrieval and tracking of lost gear to reduce this risk?”

“This is truly a heartbreaker because of the whale’s injuries, but we will learn so much from this case that can help us prevent future entanglements,” said Lauren Saez, who helped coordinate the response for NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region. “We disentangled the whale safely, got all the gear back, and had great collaboration with the fishing industry. Additionally, we got whale DNA samples from the gear to help identify which population it belongs to. All this information is crucial to understand what happened and what we can do to help prevent future entanglements.”

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries