No crab for the holidays: 2026 Dungeness season delayed to protect whales

Linda Zavoral, Bay Area News Group on Nov 4, 2026

Published in Outdoors

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SAN JOSE, Calif. — For the seventh consecutive year, California officials are delaying the Bay Area’s commercial Dungeness crab season because of the high number of migrating humpback whales already getting ensnared by old crab-pot fishing lines and other gear.

And again this year, conservation groups are expressing frustration with what they say is a too-slow transition to safer fishing methods that would allow the industry to get back on the water earlier.

The 2026-27 Dungeness season normally would start Nov. 15 — meaning Californians traditionally enjoyed crab on Thanksgiving and for the winter holidays.

Instead, commercial crabbing from the Oregon border south to Point Conception in Santa Barbara County has been postponed until at least Jan. 1, 2027, “due to the number of humpback whale entanglements during the 2026 calendar year,” state officials said.

“Unfortunately,” said senior scientist Geoff Shester, Oceana’s director of fishery innovation, “California is still the nation’s leader — or loser? — with the most entanglements reported of any U.S. state,” according to a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report.

The answer, according to Shester and Ben Grundy-Hawley, an oceans campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, is allowing and encouraging fishermen to use safe pop-up gear the entire season, instead of just in the months after the season ends.

State officials “know how to stop these brutal entanglements, and I’m infuriated that they’re not doing it,” Grundy-Hawley said in a statement.

The state’s decision came down last Friday from Meghan Hertel, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and was made in consultation with representatives of the fishing industry, environmental organizations and scientists.

The next “risk assessment” will take place in mid-December, agency officials said.

Meanwhile, as in recent years, recreational crab fishing will be allowed with trap restrictions in place. That season will start Nov. 7, except for one stretch of northern Mendocino County where high levels of domoic acid have been found in the coastal waters.

Domoic acid, a toxin that could sicken anyone who eats the tainted crab, destroyed Northern California’s 2015-2016 commercial season and created delays in other years.