The Dark Side of Crab Season

Photo by Katie Robbins

On a brisk Monday evening just after dusk, Danny Murray, Bobby Cicala, and Dominic Papetti were doing what they do at the end of each day during San Francisco's Dungeness crab season. With an estimated 100 years of fishing experience among them, the three men unloaded the day's haul - a couple thousand pounds--from the depths of their 50-foot boat, the King Crab, to the docks of Pier 45 on Fisherman's Wharf. While Papetti, the senior statesman of the group (who the others joke got his start crabbing in the days of the rowboat) looked on, Murray and Cicala used a pulley system to hoist crate after crate of the precious cargo to the docks where it would be sold that evening to local buyers.

Idyllic scenes like this were celebrated a couple weeks earlier at Slow Food San Francisco's third annual festival of Dungeness crab. The event, which drew people from as far as New Jersey to enjoy freshly cracked crab dipped in lemon or butter, was held not only to mark the beginning of the crabbing season--which in the Bay Area runs from just before Thanksgiving to June--but also to celebrate what Zeke Grader, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman's Associations, called "one of the bright sides in our fishing industry."

The success of the California crab fishery stems in part from a system known as "3-S management," which restricts Dungeness crabbing by size (male crabs smaller than 6