All eyes on Karratha blue swimmer crab season

Troy Honey

April, or ultimately Easter weekend, traditionally marks the start of the blue swimmer crab season in Karratha. In 2022 the season took another couple of months after Easter before it really got going, and then continued for much longer than usual. It is a hard one to predict as the season can also start much earlier.

Water temperature and ocean currents play a big part in crab populations and movement, as well as impacts from commercial prawning, which catch the blue swimmer crabs as a by-product in the latter half of the season.

To date in 2023, we have seen signs of a very early season for this year. A fair few crabs over legal size of 127mm have been coming from Nickol Bay and Dampier Harbour, but they have been few among the many undersize crabs.

Further north in the Pilbara there have been some exceptional catches in Port Hedland. In all of the sandy bays along the Pilbara Coast you will find blue swimmer crabs.

The crabs bury themselves in the sand during the day, and ferociously feed at night under the cover of darkness for protection. Due to the large tides along the Pilbara Coast, always ensure you target areas with your nets that remain under water at low tide. Some crabs will move into areas that are exposed at low tide when the high tide roles in, but the numbers will always be much higher in areas that stay non-exposed throughout the tide cycle.

As previously mentioned, blue swimmer activity is much higher at night, and fishing for them at this time is significantly more productive, but it comes with challenges. Vision at night on the water is difficult, and with this, finding your floats is harder. I always mark each net on my sounder, even if crabbing during the day.

Another tip is to paint your floats with a fluoro colour such as green or pink, which makes it easier to see if the wind blows up and white caps form, as white floats disappear very quickly amongst white caps. And lastly for night crabbing, attach a glow stick to the floats. These work great and make for easy navigation up to each float with the boat.

I’m hoping to have lots of catch reports in the next edition for blue swimmer crabs along the Pilbara Coast. Please remember to check the size of each crab and only keep those that exceed 127mm across the carapace, and a boat limit of 40 and north coast bag limit of 20 per fisher.

There has been a great variety of fish catches in

Karratha over the last month, with the weather really turning it on to either get the boat out or enjoy a day fishing land-based. There have been several reports of big coral trout being caught from shore in Dampier Harbour, with the fuel station jetty being the pick of the spot. Plenty of trevally are also being caught here.

The mangrove jack fishing scene continues to improve in Karratha, with all the rock walls and creeks holding good numbers. The average size is between 30cm and 40cm, with the occasional jack testing the 50cm mark. Among the mangrove jacks are plenty of queenfish and Spanish flag. Quite a few barramundi and threadfin salmon have been landed in the creeks and around the mouths, and this will start to slow down as we head into May.

Spanish mackerel, longtail and mac tuna are still about, with the shoals and offshore reefs the best place to start trolling. The same areas have seen some monster GTs being caught, with the Dampier Archipelago really starting to stamp its name as the west coast hot spot for monster GTs.

The demersal fishing will slowly start to improve during April, and once we are in May it will increase rapidly as the water cools off and the demersals head into shallower water. There have still been plenty of great demersal catches over the last month, but if you are wanting reds and rankins the deeper water towards the gas rigs has been the place to fish.

If coral trout, bluebone, blueline and spangled emperor are preferred then fishing any depth throughout the archipelago has seen great numbers being caught. The coral trout fishery in the Archipelago and surrounds is second to none, and this has a lot to do with the ‘one fish per angler’ bag limit mixed with the perfect habitat and climate conditions.

We’ve had an exciting period of fishing in Karratha region as we transition from wet to dry season, but we’ll still get to enjoy the best of both fishing species combined with the lowest average wind months in April and May.