Southeast Alaska commercial Dungeness crab fall season closes Saturday night

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game will close the commercial Dungeness crab fall season across Southeast Alaska's Registration Area A at 11:59 pm Saturday, Oct. 31, ending a season the department had already cut to 30 days.

Under the department's Oct. 27 fall Dungeness crab closure advisory, all Dungeness crab must be landed within 24 hours of the closure. A vessel operator who cannot meet that deadline must contact department shellfish staff within those same 24 hours to request authorization to keep crab aboard longer.

Pots may sit in closed waters for no more than seven days after the closure, and only if every pot door is secured fully open and all bait and bait containers are removed. Extensions to store gear longer because of extreme weather or a major vessel breakdown must be requested before 11:59 pm Saturday, Nov. 7.

The closure date itself is not new. In its August announcement on the fall/winter fishery, ADF&G set the fall season at 30 days, Oct. 1 through Oct. 31, after reviewing fishery-performance data under the Southeastern Alaska Dungeness Crab Management Plan. Alaska News reported Sept. 20 that the fleet got 30 fall days instead of 60 because a harvest projection built from one week of June fishing came in short of 2.25 million pounds. The department said more legal-size soft-shelled males were discarded in the first week of summer fishing than the previous three-year average, but that this did not contribute to the shortfall.

The summer season closed July 25 after 40 days of fishing, three weeks short of the maximum, on a projected harvest of 1.5 million to 2.25 million pounds, according to the department's 2026/27 season length announcement. Alaska News reported in July that it was the worst harvest estimate in 25 years. Wrangell has since asked the state to seek a federal fishery disaster, Alaska News has reported.

Fishing ends Saturday night, landings are due by late Sunday, Nov. 1, and stored gear must be out of the water by Nov. 7. Requests for extended crab holding or a gear-storage extension go to Joe Stratman, the department's Region I shellfish biologist.