Fishing planet best place to fish in oregon12/23/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() In 2021-2022, Oregon crabbers landed more than 17 million pounds (7.7 million kilograms) and delivered a record US$91 million in crab due to high market prices.Ĭoming off such a strong year, tension over potential permanent regulations is high. The industry, a backbone of the Pacific Northwest's commercial fishing industry, can yield millions of pounds of crab in a good year and rake in tens of millions of dollars annually. East Coast have taken similar actions to protect whales. ![]() The debate in the Pacific Northwest is a microcosm of the broader struggle nationwide to address the urgent problem of whale entanglements without wiping out commercial fishermen. The move comes during a turbulent period as Oregon's Dungeness crab fishery contends with warming oceans, smaller crabs and shortened or canceled seasons due to high levels of domoic acid, a naturally occurring neurotoxin caused by algae blooms that makes the crabs inedible. Friday, the commission had yet to address the measures or vote. The restrictions, which were originally supposed to end after this season, would reduce the number of traps, known as pots, and how deep they can drop in the spring and summer months when humpbacks are more likely to encounter them. The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission is expected to vote late Friday on whether to permanently set stricter rules and pot limits put in place in 2020 to protect whales. Humpbacks, which migrate off Oregon's coast, and other whales can get caught in the vertical ropes connected to the heavy traps and drag them around for months, leaving the mammals injured, starved or so exhausted that they can drown. Pettis is among a number of veteran crabbers who fear regulators are on the cusp of curtailing the lucrative industry with overregulation to protect whales. Pettis, a crab fisherman, said it's the only time in his 44 years of fishing he has ever seen a whale caught in crab lines, and he believes that is proof such encounters are "extremely rare." That was in 2004, off the waters of Waldport, Oregon. It took two men with serrated knives 40 minutes to free the whale, which swam away with a small piece of rope still embedded in its skin. Tangled around its tail was a polypropylene rope used to pull up crab traps. ![]() In the wheelhouse of a crab boat named Heidi Sue, Mike Pettis watched the grey whale surface and shoot water through its blowhole. ![]()
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