Shipping live crab from Alaska: a risky business with logistical challenges.

• Author: Swagel, Will
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Natural Resources

Homemade sandwich signs stating "Live Crab for Sale" and directing those interested to a certain docked fishing boat are a common sight in communities on the Gulf of Alaska. Indeed, in communities all the way down the West Coast to San Francisco Bay and even farther south, live crab is sold at the docks. During the season, lucky coastal residents can easily buy the freshest crab possible.

Inland residents have a tougher time. Some retail stores and restaurants have salt water-filled tanks that can keep the crab alive for days, but most don't. Even kept moist and at low temperatures, only the very strongest crab can survive twenty-four hours out of water. A less robust crab might last fourteen hours or even less.

To get crab from Alaska fishing boats to buyers is a logistics challenge and a tense one that requires constant monitoring. Live crab is often flown at night, sometimes on air freighters chartered for the occasion.

"I can't tell you all the nights we stayed up babysitting crab," says Mike Erickson, president of Alaska Glacier Seafoods, a medium-sized fish processor located in Juneau. "There's a lot of things that could go wrong and only one thing that can go right, and that's the crab getting there healthy."

Lion's Share of King Crab

Alaska Glacier processes nearly every type of Alaska seafood, fresh and frozen, portioned or not. About seventy people work at the plant year-round and up to two hundred in summer. The family-owned company specializes in fresh product, Erickson says, which is facilitated by Juneau's robust airlift capability.

The company also specializes in supplying live king crab to eager buyers in the Lower 48, using expertise gained over two decades or more. Erickson says his company does not ship live Dungeness crab because of warmer air and surface water temperatures during the bulk of the Dungeness season, which falls during summer.

The king crab supply has been reduced in the past few years, but five years ago business was booming.

"We were once told we were the biggest live shipping exporter in the state of Alaska," Erickson says. "Five or six years ago, we were buying half the quota [of golden king crab]. It was very common for us to charter a 737 and load it up with live crab. That was a weekly activity for us.

"So the production we're doing now is a fraction of what we were doing five or seven years ago," he says.

Erickson is aware of the up-and-down nature of seafood harvests, but notes--with a caveat for...