I was watching my new addiction, Deadliest Catch, over the weekend and saw something that baffled me.
Captain Eric and his crew accidentally miscounted their catch, and ended up with too much crab in the hold, which resulted in a big loss of money that they had to soak up.
I don’t get it.
I understand the idea of establishing a quota to ensure that the crab aren’t over-fished into extinction, but how is it possible to make less money by selling more crab? First of all, can’t they just dump the extra crab back in the sea where they found it? Or, sell it to another boat who caught less than their share?
Also, why did this come as a surprise when they reached port? hand-counting seems inaccurate (and proved to be so in this case) but why isn’t there a way to check how full the hold is before cracking it open? A camera, a scale, a gauge like a fuel tank? What’s the scoop?
We can here, live and cooked Dungeness and even live, whole King crab. I’m not sure how one cooks the latter, they wouldn’t fit in any pot I own. Do you just rip the legs off?
IIRC, this was from last season. Hand counting is fine, as long as your fishermen are actually counting, instead of being lazy SOBs and just guessing. The holds are full of water, and baffles to prevent the crab from smashing each other, so it would be difficult to get a good estimate visually. In this case, the captain needed to come down like a ton of bricks and make them count properly. In prior seasons, there wasn’t a quota, you just caught as much as possible until they closed the season. They’d get something like a 12hr notice, the season is closed, head home and sell what you got.
With the prior system it was probably OK to be a bit sloppy counting, you were just worried about your boat’s strategy, how many pots to set, where to set them, when you were full and needed to offload.
With the new quota system I assume that they got in trouble by going over their boat’s limit, so they had to pay a big fine. Having a quota doesn’t do jack if the boat can earn more money by going over quota. You have to hit them hard for going significantly over, otherwise they will always go a bit over quota since there’s not much downside.
From what I recall of the episode, it wasn’t that they actually lost money (though I think Mike Rowe, or whoever writes his script was stating it as such to be more dramatic). What they were saying was happening was that instead of getting $x/pound of crab, once they were over their quota, they were only receiving $y/pound of crab, where x was significantly larger than y. So they were still making money for the crab that they caught over their quota, just not as much as they could have been had they received $x/pound for everything they caught.
Now, I suppose it’s possible that $y/pound isn’t enough to cover the expense of operating the boat (fuel/bait/maintenance/food costs) so they may have lost money in that manner.
First it was a one-time special, then another special, then a mini-series, then a full-blown show!
Is Discovery Channel gonna just introduce The Discovery Crab Catching Channel at some point?!
I mean, the first shows were really interesting, but jeez! We get it already! Its really really hard, dangerous work. How many ways can you tell the same story!
Crab does not ship/keep well. Even worse than lobster. Even freezing it (raw) makes it not nearly as good as the current method, which is cooking it first, then sending it to wherever it’s going, IIRC.
OK, this makes sense. But what about just dumping the crab back in the ocean? You’d take a hit on the fuel to go back to the crabbing ground, sure, but it shouldn’t be as bad as the fine, right?
IIRC, they were dropping that crab off at St. Paul Island, home of one of the processing plants.
The boat had agreed to provide 50,000 lbs of their quota to that particular plant. Due to the odd rules of how they need to catch/offload, they needed to offload all of their catch, which was over the 50,000 lbs contracted to that particular plant. Because they went over, they get less per pound.
I think he got partly hosed on this, especially the Fish & Game’s response, and partly hosed by his crew. Hopefully they learned a lesson that the rules have changed, and they need to comply, tired or not. While I’d have been upset as a member of the crew, he was right that the blatent miscounting of the deck crew shouldn’t impact the owner’s share of the rightful profits.
So you’re saying that when the crew screws up, it shouldn’t impact the owner’s profits, but when the owner screws up, it should impact everyone’s profits? As someone who has been both owner and crew in a commercial fishing boat, that doesn’t even begin to make sense.
This episode was on today. I think it might have been edited out-of-order… it sounded like they had a plan to deal with the excess crab: just keep it in the tank while they filled up the rest of the boat. This shouldn’t have caused too much loss, but the captain wasa talking about the crew paying for it BEFORE he found out he couldn’t do that, which makes no sense.
Anyways, the main issue is that you know how much you’re going to take in when you start: your quota x price per lb. Selling crab for less than the going rate hurts your bottom line. And the real lurking issue is that the owner can just sell their quota to someone else, and skip all the work of fishing, and put the crew out of a job. So you reall don’t want to hurt the bottom line.
