Rapidly advancing sea ice has left crabbers scrambling to get their gear out of the water or stuck in port, waiting for better weather. 

As soon as Mark Casto got into port on Tuesday, he was already getting ready to head back out.  He’s captain of the crabber Pinnacle. With the ice coming down rapidly, he’s worried about the two hundred pots he still has in the water.

“It’s just finding them again, if you can find them.”

Casto says that the ice can drag pots for ten of miles and pop the buoys that keep them afloat.  He’s hoping he can make it to his pots before they’re overtaken by the ice edge.

“Well I’m hoping they’re 60-70 miles, but reports from the grounds say it might be closer than that.  So I’ve just got my fingers crossed that we can get back up there in time.”

Casto isn’t the only one.  Fish and Game area management biologist Heather Fitch says there are more than 8000 snow crab pots out on the fishing ground right now.   They cost at least a thousand dollars each, so that’s more than $8 million worth of gear.  And Fitch says almost all of the pots are north of 56.5 degrees.  The ice was already at that latitude east of the Pribilof islands Tuesday and is forecast to move in quickly to the west.     

Kathleen Cole is an ice forecaster for the National Weather Service in Anchorage.  She says that’s unusual.

“It’s moving across the crab grounds and the cod area.  It’s moving into where they keep processing ships.  And it’s big ice.  This isn’t just 4-6 inch ice that we see often along the ice edge.  There’s ice thicker than a foot and half in some of these floes and some of the floes coming down are over 15 miles wide.”

Cole says the ice is moving more quickly than usual as well.

“In a regular day-to-day ice forecast, the ice might move 2-3 miles a day.  And here we’re having ice movements around 10 miles a day or more. There are some floes I’ve watched on satellite imagery that actually have moved 15-20 miles in a day.”

Cole says the ice edge hit St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs on Monday morning and will probably reach past St. George, 50 miles to the south, by the end of the week.

Many crabbers who just finished up the pot cod season last week and hadn’t headed out for their first snow crab run are waiting out the ice in Unalaska. 

Skipper Lance Farr is one of them.

“We’re not going to go up now, in the face of the ice coming down and shutting the season down, the forecast.  We’re going to wait, you know, hopefully the weather changes in a couple weeks and then we’ll start.”

He says the biggest problem with waiting is that it pushes back the season and increases expenses.  But he added that this isn’t the first time this has happened.

“One year they even just canceled the whole season, delayed the season for a couple months that there was no grounds to really start on.”

Crabber Mark Casto, who’s heading north for his pots, says it’s all part of being a crab fisherman.

“It’s pretty much every year there’s an ice adventure of some sort.  Sometimes it’s trying to get into St. Paul and sometimes it’s fishing around the ice.  So, we just need a good southerly blow to come through and slow things down a bit.  It’d be good for everybody.”