The heavy breaths of a diver come over the intercom on the F/V Cadence, telling the deck crew what he’s seeing at about 100 feet deep in North Hood Canal.
The diver, David Blackshaw, is looking for a derelict crab pot, one of the nearly 11,000 that are lost every year in Puget Sound.
Finding one, Blackshaw clips a rope to the pot with a carabiner, then instructs the deck crew to haul it up. As the pot surfaces, two deckhands grab and inspect it, removing any shellfish that has been caught, including several large Dungeness crab.
“That’s exactly what we don’t want,” said Jason Morgan, the marine projects manager for the Northwest Straits Foundation (NWSF), which oversees the region’s derelict pot removal and works with tribes like the Port Gamble S’Klallam in these efforts. “The number one impact of derelict crab pots is Dungeness crab, because it captures and kills crab.”
After a pot is lost on the floor of the sound, it will continue to “ghost fish”—catch crab with no one to harvest or release them.
“Once the bait in the trap is gone, trapped crab will feed on other crab,” Morgan said. “Slower, more lethargic, smaller crab can get eaten by the bigger crab. Crab die. Crab come and feed on dead crab. It can be a self-feeding mechanism.”
Within those 11,000 pots, more than 140,000 harvestable Dungeness crab die annually, he said.
“Tribal fishers depend on crab and other shellfish for their economic livelihoods, traditional cultural practices, and subsistence,” said Josh Carter, the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe’s environmental scientist. “Anything that prevents crab from needlessly dying is a boon for the tribe, particularly given all of the other environmental threats to tribal members’ way of life.”
The tribe has more than 70 registered crabbers, earning about $4.5 million a year overall.
While NWSF and partner Natural Resources Consultants conduct removals all over the sound regularly, it isn’t feasible to try and get all 11,000, Morgan said. The foundation instead focuses on education and outreach, such as teaching crabbers how to prevent pots from ghost fishing should they become unretrievable.
“If we can do things like make a more effective pot, allowing crab to escape once it is lost, that’ll really go a long way,” he said. “The number one cause is user error with unweighted pots and not having enough line being the most common problem.”
Since the program started in 2002, more than 8,000 pots have been retrieved. After inspection, they are either returned to the owner, donated, reused or recycled if unusable.
The partnership with the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe started when the North Kitsap Puget Sound Anglers Club approached the tribe and NWSF about doing a crab pot removal project together. After securing funding, NWSF and the tribe were able to conduct a removal session this summer in Port Gamble Bay, North Hood Canal and Squamish Harbor.
To find the derelict pots, the foundation surveys the sound using sidescan sonar. A torpedo-shaped sonar is dragged on a cable behind a boat. The sonar sends beams from both sides, scanning a 50-meter swath. The boat and sonar will track back and forth across an area to collect data, which is later analyzed for potential pot locations. After an area is scanned, a dive boat is contracted, dates are set and divers retrieve the pots they can find.
In June 2024, 141 pots were identified in the scan and 96 pots were removed. The remaining were either not found, were rocks or stumps the same size as the targets, or more than 75% buried in the sediment, so they were unable to be removed but they also were disabled so they could no longer catch crab, Morgan said.
Carter appreciates the fact that the tribe and other groups can collaborate on a project that benefits everyone.
“Working with others within the broader community helps make people understand that tribal interests are often their interests as well,” he said.
How a crab pot works
Every crab pot has an “emergency escape route” which releases after a pot has been lost for a period of time to allow crab to escape. They also have an escape ring for undersized and female crab from which to escape at all times (crab fisheries only allow for males 6 ¼” inches wide or larger to be harvested).
However, not every pot is made the same; some pots have escape routes for crab that work and some that don’t, Morgan said.
NWSF conducted a crab pot escapement study in 2015, showing that while a certain type of escape system within a crab pot works the best, many of the pots used today are not effective at allowing crab to escape. A simple solution is to have an escape ring attached with “rot cord”—a type of natural fabric, such as 1/8” cotton string, that degrades and creates an outlet for crab to escape if the pot is lost. The NWSF study showed that all crab have the ability to escape with this simple modification to ineffective pot designs. Using plastic, such as ZipTies, is illegal and defeats the purpose.
For more information, visit: nwstraitsfoundation.org/derelict-gear/
A kelp-covered derelict crab pot is retrieved from near Port Gamble Bay. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal
