It was an efficient season for the six boats that fished Eastern Aleutian golden king crab this year.

The boats caught all 3.15 million pounds of quota before Thanksgiving.

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s preliminary figures, they owe their speedy season to a higher-than-average catch rate.  Fishermen pulled up an average of 35 legal crab per pot.  That’s almost 25 percent above the average since rationalization and a new record for the fishery.

Chad Hoefer is skipper of the Erla-N.  He says the higher catch rates don’t just mean more time at home around the holidays.

“If you’re seeing phenomenal fishing, then normally that means that you’re on the ocean less days and that means less fuel burnt, less pots turned, less bait to get your harvest done.  So it’s a win-win all the way around.”

Hoefer attributes the higher catch rate at least in part to the size of the fishing fleet.  With only six boats covering the area from Cape Sarichef to Atka, Hoefer says pots often stays in the water for longer.

“Obviously in a two week period, our bait is pretty much expired and then there’s not a lot of motivation for juveniles and females to stay in there, so they get out through the large escapement valve, so the pots when we bring them up are quite clean.”

By ‘clean’ he means there are mostly legal adult males in the pot.   So leaving gear in the water for longer means that legal crab have more time to migrate into the pots and the ones fishermen don’t want have more time to migrate out.  Hoefer says he thinks that could affect the health of the population in addition to the catch rate.

“To not be handling and to not have the opportunity for any mortality for those crabs that are being handled, that’s another positive too.  And that could, indirectly, be contributing to our increased numbers.”

Estimates of how the golden king population is actually doing are hard to come by.  Unlike the Bering Sea crab fisheries, the Aleutian Island king crab fisheries aren’t surveyed annually.  The last survey was done in 2006 and another one will happen this coming summer.