Southeast red king crab season opens Nov. 1 with 213,076-pound quota

The commercial red and blue king crab fishery in Southeast Alaska will open at 10 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 1, with a regionwide guideline harvest level, or quota, of 213,076 pounds. That figure clears the 200,000-pound minimum required under the Southeast Alaska Red King Crab Management Plan (5 AAC 34.113) to hold a commercial season at all by 13,076 pounds, about 6 percent.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced the opening Wednesday in a one-page advisory from the Douglas Area Office, issued by regional shellfish biologist Adam Messmer. It will run as a competitive fishery, open access rather than shares. Pot tags, logbook packets and registrations will be available in area offices after Sept. 11. Area-by-area harvest levels, fishery boundaries and registration details will come in a later advisory. Messmer can be reached at 907-465-4853.

The department's harvest table for Registration Area A shows the fishery closed for the 2018/19 through 2022/23 seasons, and closed far more often than open since the 1980s. Since 2006 it has opened three times; this will be the fourth. In 2011/12 the fleet landed 176,402 pounds on 54 permits, and in 2017/18 it landed 120,002 pounds on 48.

From 1988 a surplus of 300,000 pounds of legal crab was required. The Alaska Board of Fisheries cut it to 200,000 pounds in 2002 on an industry proposal, with industry arguing at the time that anything lower would not be economically viable, and attached a three-year sunset. The sunset was removed in 2005. Messmer and the Petersburg Vessel Owners Association have both characterized the 200,000-pound figure as an outdated, non-biological economic limit that can block smaller, still-conservative openings.

Most of last season's quota came from water the department does not count, and no harvest-and-effort summary for that season has been published, so the 211,573 pounds authorized for 2025/26 is not a reported catch total. Of that figure, 135,679 pounds, or 64 percent, was assigned to what the department calls other areas, meaning the non-surveyed portion of the region. That number is produced by applying an expansion factor to surveyed results, and the department changed the expansion last season, moving from a 65.2/34.8 split between surveyed and non-surveyed water to 52.8/47.2. The 47.2 percent is a historical figure, drawn from 1974 to 1984 harvests.

Five of the eight lines in the department's table carried a harvest rate of zero, the share of biomass it allows to be taken: Pybus Bay, Peril Strait, Lynn Sisters, Excursion Inlet and the blue king crab component. Three carried commercial quota: Seymour Canal at 44,705 pounds, the Juneau area at 20,446 and Gambier Bay at 9,948.

"The Juneau area (Section 11-A) had healthy stock health; Lynn Sisters, Gambier Bay, and Seymour Canal had moderate stock health; and Excursion Inlet and Pybus Bay had poor stock health," Messmer and his coauthors wrote in the January 2026 stock assessment. In 2025 the Pybus Bay survey set 50 pots and caught no juvenile males and four large females. Excursion Inlet set 55 pots and found 20 crab. Juneau set 214 pots and counted 1,363 juvenile males alone.

Regional legal male biomass was 2.65 million pounds for 2025/26, up 55 percent from 2024, but still below the long-term median of 3,001,030 pounds. The assessment also records it above half that median, its floor. Mature male biomass was 3.72 million pounds, up 42 percent on the year before. "The impact of the commercial fishery opening in the 2017-2018 season is confounded by potentially increased personal use harvest in the survey areas," its authors wrote.

The regulatory season runs Nov. 1 through Jan. 24, and harvest is restricted to male crab at least 7 inches across the carapace. Pot limits, set on a sliding scale between 20 and 50 pots per vessel, depend on the harvest level and will come with the follow-up announcement.