Ropeless Fishing Gear Archives

CALIFORNIA: No crab for the holidays as 2026 Dungeness season delayed to protect whales

November 2, 2026 — For the seventh consecutive year, California officials are delaying the Bay Area’s commercial Dungeness crab season because of the high number of migrating humpback whales already getting ensnared by old crab-pot fishing lines and other gear.

And again this year, conservation groups are expressing frustration with what they say is a too-slow transition to safer fishing methods that would allow the industry to get back on the water earlier.

The 2026-27 Dungeness season normally would start Nov. 15 – meaning Californians traditionally enjoyed crab on Thanksgiving and for the winter holidays.

Instead, commercial crabbing from the Oregon border south to Point Conception in Santa Barbara County has been postponed until at least Jan. 1, 2027, “due to the number of humpback whale entanglements during the 2026 calendar year,” state officials said.

“Unfortunately,” said senior scientist Geoff Shester, Oceana’s director of fishery innovation, “California is still the nation’s leader – or loser? – with the most entanglements reported of any U.S. state,” according to a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report.

Read the full article at The Fresno Bee

CALIFORNIA: A Fledgling Fishery Hopes to Turn the Tide on Whale-Safe Gear

October 28, 2026 — At 7:30 on a clear morning in December 2025, I arrived at the marina in Oxnard, California, in search of Mikey Volaski, one of the only commercial fishers in North America whose operation is dedicated to brown box crab.

His crew met me at the marina gate and escorted me to Volaski’s boat, the Coastal Reign—a pearly New England-style fishing vessel with a V-shaped hull for cutting through rough waters. Justin Harrison-Muñoz, the more experienced of Volaski’s two deck hands, had fished in Alaska before moving to California in 2020. Gerardo Barrera had never boarded a boat until he got a job with Volaski about five years ago. But he loved the work. “The ocean is my office, and I like that,” he told me. As the two loaded bait—a plastic trash can full of frozen mackerel—the rubbery sound of a barking sea lion rang through the marina.

Volaski showed up at 8, after finishing an all-night shift at the fire station, a job that helped support his fishing. He had grown up in a fishing family, and now was building his own operation. Wiry, with a neatly trimmed blonde mustache, he leapt aboard, and, with an air of efficiency, immediately fired up the motor and pulled away from the dock. On the way out to trap sites near California’s Channel Islands, Harrison-Muñoz chopped the mackerel and Barrera loaded chunks of it into small, bright-orange canisters with slits that would allow the crabs to sense the bait but not eat it.

Their target was the brown box crab (Lopholithodes foraminatus), an oddly charismatic crustacean with a spiky, mottled, peachy-pink shell. It looks like a cross between a pine cone and a dish scrubber. When alarmed, instead of snapping its claws at antagonists, the crab tucks its legs tightly against its body, forming the protective, boxy shape for which it is named.

Box crabs aren’t widely known as seafood. Unlike the more popular Dungeness crabs (Metacarcinus magister), which live in the shallows and the intertidal, box crabs can venture 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet) below the surface—deeper than the tallest Los Angeles skyscraper is high. Partly because they are harder to reach, they have never sustained a commercial fishery long-term. But Volaski is part of a small but growing experiment to try to change that—and in the process demonstrate that commercial crab and lobster fishers can make a living without endangering whales.

Traditional shellfish operations rely on underwater traps marked with floating buoys. The heavy ropes and lines that attach the buoys to the traps dangle vertically through the water, creating hazards for swimming animals. Once entangled, a whale can swim thousands of miles with fishing lines, nets, or metal tearing into its skin. Entanglement is one of the leading causes of injury and death to whales worldwide. Because of this threat, some fishers have been working with researchers and conservationists to develop an alternative—a technology called “ropeless” or “pop-up gear.” Ropeless gear allows fishers to keep their traps secure on the seafloor—without any vertical lines—until they are ready to retrieve them.

As we approached the first trap site, Volaski showed me how his setup worked. He had chosen gear designed by two West Coast companies, Sub Sea Sonics and Guardian Ropeless Systems, and aimed specifically at affordability: about $1,500 per unit, a fifth of the cost of higher-end models. In this system, a box called a “sled” sits on the sea floor attached by a long horizontal rope (or line) to a set of crab traps. Volaski used an app on his smartphone to trigger the sled to release an orange buoy about the size of a basketball, which soon popped up at the surface with the line in tow. He then maneuvered the boat until the buoy was at the starboard side, and the crew lifted it from the water with a long pole. They attached the buoy’s line to a pulley system, called a pincher-puller, which began reeling in the sled and the seven traps that trailed behind into the boat. It made a horrific whine. To position the traps at the depths where the crabs live, the crew needed more than 200 meters (700 feet) of line.

In the beginning, “all that line coming off at once” was scary, said Harrison-Muñoz. “You get tangled up on it, that’s going to take you right overboard.”

By this point, however, the three men had found a rhythm. Harrison-Muñoz had a carefully choreographed method for turning the rope to make sure it stacked neatly back in the sled as it came aboard. He often persuaded the younger Barrera to do much of the heavy lifting, hoisting each trap onto the deck. “Keeps him off his phone,” Harrison-Muñoz joked. The men sorted dozens of crabs, storing some in a plastic bin and tossing back the smaller ones. One of the traps held a box crab nearly 18 centimeters (7 inches) across, the biggest they had ever caught. The crew repeated this process with a second set of traps near Anacapa Island, then sailed another half-hour to the west side of Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, where they retrieved and reloaded a third set. The whole process consumed about half of the day, even though Volaski had to set aside his original plan to retrieve a fourth and fifth set of traps when the ocean whipped up intense tidal currents. By the end, everyone’s overalls were dripping from the waist down, and we all reeked of mackerel.

About halfway back to the marina, whitecaps and ripples appeared on the ocean surface. Then dozens of dolphins arced into the air on both sides of the boat. A squabble of gulls hovered above. But Volaski had seen something else. A humpback fluke lifted up a hundred meters away, then sank into the water. Then more whales—10 or 15 swimming in the distance. Then closer. He stopped and turned off the engine. Volaski’s pointed finger followed a shape under the water. We heard the low-pitched blast of a whale spout, its back rounding out just a few meters behind the boat, then immediately beside us. It was examining us. We were almost close enough to touch.

Read the full article at The Fern

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