CORTEZ – Stone crab season is off to a slow start in Cortez, where restaurant managers say unusually clear water has kept the crabs hidden and out of their traps and high fuel costs are diminishing the stone crabbers’ earnings.
“They’re barely catching anything because the water is so clear right now. The crabs aren’t moving,” said Jim Gowett, manager of Star Fish Company Market and Restaurant.
Gowett said stone crabs stay put in clear water because they are easy for predators to pick off. They hide in the mud and don’t wander into traps. The bottom needs to be stirred up, he said.
Gowett said the crabbers check their traps daily, but they have too many to get to each one every day, so they rotate through them. Most traps sit no more than five miles offshore. With the catch so thin, some boats are losing money on those trips because of the price of gas, he said.
“Who knows, maybe this is just a year where they’re not around,” Gowett said. “We won’t know until the water gets muddied.”
Stone crab season began on Oct. 15 and runs through May 1, which could leave plenty of time for an upturn.
The Florida Panhandle, by contrast, is doing well, Gowett said. Star Fish has been buying Panhandle claws.
Crabbers there are landing mostly jumbo and colossal claws rather than mediums, which Gowett said can be a hard sell. Colossal claws at Star Fish Co. are priced at about $45 per pound, and customers get one to two claws for that, he said.
Gowett said the weather is the most pressing issue for now.
“All this nice weather that everybody loves is bad for the industry, but that’s Mother Nature,” he said.
Adam Sears, general manager of the Swordfish Grill and the Cortez Kitchen, said fuel is “as high as it gets.” Meanwhile, the price paid to crabbers has barely moved.
“We own a boat too. We’d love to be able to pay more to the boat, but you just can’t,” Sears said.
Sears said there’s also strong competition from larger fleets. Some crabbers up north have as many as 20,000 traps, and operators in the Florida Keys and elsewhere can land 1,000 or 2,000 pounds at once, flooding the market.
“You have to adjust or you’re not going to sell your product,” Sears said.
At Cortez Kitchen, a medium stone crab dinner runs about $35 to $40 and includes about six claws and two sides. Sears said that makes it one of the most affordable places in the area to get them.
“Every year, it’s tough,” Sears said. “There are so many variables. Fuel cost is obviously huge. Then there’s crew labor cost, maintenance on your boat – and then the weather and the market prices not correlating with costs. You can only go so high before people say, ‘No, it’s not going to work.’”
