BY ANDY WALGAMOTT, NORTHWEST SPORTSMAN MAGAZINE
Blowing off reporting Puget Sound Dungeness crab catches could soon pinch shellfishers’ wallets a little harder.
The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission this morning unanimously directed WDFW to begin rulemaking to increase the penalty for recreational crabbers who don’t report their harvest (or even lack thereof) from the inland sea.
Currently, it’s a $10 fee, payable when you go to purchase your next license, but WDFW says that that amount “no longer provides sufficient incentive” to spur people to report their activities – a requirement since 2007 – and they’ve “exhausted” outreach and other avenues to educate the public about it.
“We are seeing a pretty significant decline in reporting,” stated Fish Program Director Kelly Cunningham on Thursday.
According to an agency presentation to the commission’s Fish Committee yesterday, only about 42 to 43 percent of recreational crabbers reported their catch in 2025, down from a high of 56 percent or so in the early 2010s, which per Cunningham was a “pretty good” rate.
In the first two years the requirement was implemented, reporting rates were in the low 20s, and it dipped as low as the upper 30s in 2020 during Covid, the year fishing and hunting was also closed for six weeks by order of former Governor Jay Inslee.
WDFW says that sport crab catch cards produce the “primary data” for estimating harvest, managing the popular opportunity and, when it is combined with nontreaty commercial catch data, figuring out state-tribal harvest splits.
“This is important because catch reporting is vitally important to that fishery. It’s important to us and it’s important for the comanagers,” said Cunningham. “It is how we manage the fishery. It is how assess where we are with quotas. And it is how we account for our catch and meet our conservation objectives.”
Puget Sound is considered to be the Strait of Juan de Fuca, San Juan Islands, Admiralty Inlet, Hood Canal and the waters off Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia.
State shellfish managers have long been pushed by tribal comanagers to improve sport catch accounting, and in recent years as compliance has slid, that pressure has increased.
“We think recreational harvest is being underreported. The state and its recreational crabbers need to
take accountability for their share of the resource,” Ed Johnstone, chair of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, wrote in his August 2023 “Being Frank” column, echoing previous Chair Lorraine Loomis in a 2017 op-ed.
Johnstone acknowledged that WDFW had been trying to boost reporting rates in various ways and was adding an electronic option via Fish Washington, but worried that “people who can’t be bothered to turn in their catch cards won’t use the app either.” He claimed that some crabbers view the penalty as a “donation to the state” instead of an actual punishment.
The $10 penalty came from the 2007 state legislature, but in 2025, Senate Bill 5583 – which also hiked the cost of fishing and hunting licenses for the first time since 2011 – changed that.
Under SB 5583, “the Fish and Wildlife Commission now has clear authority to update this penalty through rulemaking,” according to WDFW, and since its passage, several Puget Sound tribes have communicated directly to WDFW and Commission Chair Jim Anderson that the commission should use it.
“I want to be really clear here. We’re not trying to punish folks. We are trying incentivize them to follow the regulations which require them to report their catch,” said Cunningham.
At the end of yesterday’s Fish Committee briefing, commission Vice Chair John Lehmkuhl spoke in support of rulemaking.
“I mean, information is everything, right? I mean .. we are a science-based organization. If we don’t have the data, we’re not going to have good decisions,” he said.
It’s unclear how much the penalty would increase, but Lehmkuhl threw out ideas like basing it on the market value of Dungies or the value of the information.
Nonreporting penalties are deposited in WDFW’s limited fish and wildlife account, where hunting and angling license fees go and can’t be tapped for the General Fund. Deadline to report this summer’s crabbing success is October 1.
This morning with the full commission in session, Chair Anderson moved to begin rulemaking and delegate that authority to Director Kelly Susewind.
He was seconded by Commissioner Molly Linville, and also voting in favor were Barbara Baker, Woody Myers, Stephen Parker and Melanie Rowland.
The three other commissioners were either excused (Lehmkuhl and Victor Garcia) or absent (Lorna Smith).
