Crack Into Crab Season

Wtih the Dungeness season under way, we catch a ride with a crab fisherman on the steep and lonely swells of the Pacific as he wrestles in the goods. Then we're off to the docks, where the feisty haul is weighed and packed for delivery. Finally we land at Walnut Creek Yacht Club to cook up our catch using the recipes of chef Kevin Weinberg. Come along for a ride and a meal of a lifetime.

Photography by Mitch Tobias

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Chapter One. Creatures of the cool depths 

On a gray morning, the ocean pulsing with six-foot swells, Marc Alley cranks up a loud hydraulic winch to raise one of his crab pots from the deep. He watches the cable with narrow eyes, grown narrower by the sun. A dirty-blond rattail pokes out from beneath his baseball cap. The air reeks of diesel fuel and fish guts. Plastic buckets crowd his boat—some filled with squid and sardines, others with broad slabs of fish scrap, and still others with his quarry, the sweet-meated Dungeness.
 

Alley kills the winch as the cage emerges from the water. A clutch of brownish orange crabs clings to the wire netting, a few still blindly ravaging the bait. Far from the ice-packed display counters of the grocery store, they are wild, dangerous creatures. “If they’re angry, they’ll come after you,” Alley says. “Once in a while, one will pinch me hard on a thumb or finger, and I’ll throw him back. He’s earned it.”
 

Using a set of calipers, Alley measures each crab as he chats, tossing the big ones into a bucket, tossing the little guys into the water to live another day. The cage empty, he repacks the two bait cups, one with the stinky squid and sardines to attract the crabs, the other, more generously, with scraps of swordfish and cod, “to keep them happy until I come back.”

Alley personally built his 20-foot craft, the Ronna Lynn, named after his sister. Although the massive fishing rigs of his competitors dwarf his little boat, he says he regularly surpasses them in volume, as well as in the quality, of his catch. "These are handpicked, not crammed together in a huge net, where they can fight with each other," he says. "They have all their parts."

Alley steers his craft along a seemingly invisible string of traps, each marked by a colored buoy denoting his ownership, repeating the same process: Pull the pot, empty the pot, rebait the pot, and toss it back. He appears to locate the buoys almost by intuition, the thick-shouldered hills of Pacifica his only landmark. This is what he has gained after decades in the business—there’s a learning curve in fishing, he says, 10 years, at the very least—little things such as reading the wind and packing good-quality chocolate and ginger ale. During the height of the season, he might spend 15 hours at sea with nothing more than a sandwich. He has slept overnight on the open waves in his tiny boat. The work is a part of him. “It’s in your DNA,” he says. “It’s in your system.”

He pulls up another pot and inspects it with dismay, as it is suspiciously short of crabs. Someone, he believes, has been fingering his pots. There’s no way to prove it. The ocean remains an open frontier of Darwinian rule. Alley never tells anyone if he has pulled in a good haul. Don’t give them anything, he says, “or everyone moves in on you.” Nor will he name the craftsman who builds his crab pots at $200 a pop. While Alley says he earns $2,000 to $5,000 a week during the season, he invested $20,000 in equipment last year, virtually doubling the size of an operation that, left to the mercy of the ocean, could be stolen or lost in a storm. He has too much at stake to flap his lips.

A week before, two experienced sailors died in a sailboat race just up the coast. A year before, a fisherman died in a storm. But today, the fog has burned off, turning the Pacific a navy teal. He pulls up another pot, this one teeming with big, cantankerous orange beasts. “And then you get something like this, and it’s kinda like Christmas,” he says with a grin. He boldly reaches into the cage to remove the orneriest one of the bunch, stretching at least a foot and a half from claw to claw. “Look at this guy,” he says with obvious respect. “A champion.”