Unalaska could process St. Paul’s snow crab again next year, but officials won’t know for sure until October.
The Trident Seafoods plant on the remote Bering Sea Island of St. Paul hasn’t processed any snow crab since 2022, when the fishery closed for two years due to massive population declines.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reopened the snow crab fishery last year, with a historically low harvest amount of 4.7 million pounds. Unalaska stepped in to process St. Paul’s allocation of the harvest — nearly 1.6 million pounds — which would have otherwise gone unfished.
Trident said it was too little to justify opening the plant in St. Paul, which normally employs about 280 workers during the peak of the fishery, and provides essential tax revenue to the City of St. Paul. City officials say the small Pribilof community missed out on about $3 million in tax income during the fishery closures.
Some fisheries specialists suspect there will be an increase in the total allowable snow crab catch limits, including Unalaska’s Natural Resource Analyst Frank Kelty. He said there may be more crab to harvest this upcoming season than last.
“But I don't know if the increase is going to be enough that the operator up at St. Paul will want to operate again,” Kelty said at a recent Unalaska City Council meeting.
Fish and Game won’t release the official catch limits until October.
Still, Kelty said at the meeting, “I got a hunch that we’ll probably be asked to do the same program again.”
The City of Unalaska joined St. Paul in an agreement in January allowing them to process any of St. Paul’s North Region crab that was landed locally. Unalaska City Council members voted to give the City of St. Paul its normal seafood taxes for those crab landings. St. Paul was set to receive state fisheries business tax from the same catch as well.
Unalaska expected to see a sales tax revenue bump and increased economic activity for the delivery and processing of the extra crab.
There was some initial concern about how the system would work, especially with keeping track of what crab came from the North Region of the fishery. But Kelty said overall, it went well.
“We got all the bugs worked out,” he said. “We had good cooperation by the processors, the harvesters — so we know how to do it now.”
The snow crab fishery typically opens in mid-October, but the crabs are usually harvested from about January to around May, when the season closes.
