Good signs as crab season reopens in parts of Puget Sound

The sport crab season reopens Sunday in parts of Puget Sound, and the opportunities should be good heading into the New Year.

Central Puget Sound (Area 10) and most of northern Puget Sound (9) will be open daily at sunrise this Sunday through Jan. 2. A portion of Area 9 south of a line from Foulweather Bluff to Olele Point will remain closed.

Crab fishing is also open daily now through Jan. 2 at Neah Bay (4), Sekiu (5) and southern Puget Sound (13).

This past summer, fisheries managers referred to the season as fairly good.

"We got a lot of phone calls from people, so we knew it was a good summer pretty much right from the starting line," said Steve Burton, a state Fish and Wildlife shellfish biologist.

Hood Canal is currently open but will close at 6 p.m. Saturday, and Burton pointed out that it is ending on a positive note this year.

"We are looking at preliminary data and delaying that [fall/winter] fishery, and it appears that [summer fishing] was successful and better than we had anticipated," said Burton, who indicated it suffered from poor catches in 2007-08.

Burton said that state and tribal fish managers took some conservative measures to try to help the Hood Canal crab fishery along.

Crabbing won't reopen in the eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca (6), San Juan Islands (7), east side of Whidbey Island (8-1 and 8-2) and south central Puget Sound (11), where the summer catch reached its annual sport quota.

"We want to give crabbers as much opportunity to fish as possible, but with great weather this summer, we had a lot of people out crabbing and catch rates were high," Rich Childers, a state Fish and Wildlife shellfish manager, said in a release.

Of the more than 236,000 people that were issued Puget Sound crab licenses, 104,634 complied with the mandatory Sept. 21 reporting deadline. That includes 70,172 who filed their summer catch reports online.

"Compliance is getting better and better," Burton said.

To increase compliance, the state Fish and Wildlife Commission in 2008 approved a $10 fine for failure to file a catch report. Crabbers failing to submit their winter reports whether or not they catch crab by Jan. 15 will receive the fine when they apply for a 2010 Puget Sound crab license.

Quick bites

• Squid jigging is improving at the Bremerton, Des Moines and Edmonds piers, and Pier 86 in Seattle. Some early chums arrived in estuaries off Johns Creek in Oakland Bay, Kennedy Creek in Totten Inlet and off the Hoodsport Hatchery.

Mark Yuasa: 206-464-8780 or myuasa@seattletimes.com