Hurricane Milton caused widespread destruction across West and Central Florida, bringing tornadoes, rain, wind and massive storm surge causing tragic loss of life and millions of dollars in damage.
It hasn’t done the stone crab industry any favors either.
October 15 marks the annual start of Florida’s stone crab season, which runs through May 15, 2025. But along with the usual sense of joyful anticipation, there is also some concern about how the first few weeks of the season will play out in the future. after not one but two major hurricanes recently passed through the Gulf of Mexico.
Under normal conditions, crabbers begin setting stone crab traps on October 5 and 6 and then retrieve them on the opening day of the season. With Milton lurking in the Gulf, many crabbers decided to either set just one or two traps or hold off altogether until the threat passed.
This means that there may be fewer crabs in the traps on October 15, which means fewer crabs available for your eating pleasure.
Chef Michael Schwartz of Michael’s Authentic and Amara in Paraiso, both of which serve the meaty legs with mustard sauce or a green sambal sauce, admits he’s a little concerned.
“I’m now worried about the start of the season,” he said. ‘Will the storm make it difficult? There is a lot of inventory on the West Coast and from what I’m hearing from my sources, the season will have a rough start.”
Schwartz isn’t the only one concerned. Wholesaler Rene Cardenas of Hialeah-based The Fish Plug is also waiting to see what will happen on Tuesday.
“We won’t know anything until the 15th,” he said. “Then we will know whether we are still good. We’re just waiting to see what happened. This weather is death to us; in bad weather you can’t go outside to check the traps.”
There is also another problem for crab boats. Key West native Mario Palazon of FreshCo Fish Market & Grill in Kendall, who has been in the seafood wholesale business for more than two decades, said a few of his crab suppliers reported that their traps were not where they left them.
“It’s a disaster,” he said. “Their traps are blown around. So now they have to look for their traps. And the water is cloudy. The bottom of that ocean is nowhere near what it looked like last week. So they’ll be trying to see where the hurricane has blown them, even if they can’t pull them up until the 15th.”
What will make a difference for restaurants in the first week of the season is where they source their stone crabs, Palazon said. Crabbers working in the Keys and Everglades City, two of the biggest spots in the entire country for catching stone crabs, will have most of their traps set in the Atlantic Ocean or far enough south in the Gulf that they are not affected.
But Milton will have impacted the crabbing areas in St. Petersburg and Tampa, which produced a higher average per trap last year, according to Roger Duarte, CEO of Miami-based George Stone Crab, the largest vertical stone crab operation in North America (he has its own fleet of fishermen and boats and handles its own processing and distribution).
Duarte’s fleet opted to wait until the end of last week to set the traps, so he also expects a slow start to the season. But he looks on the positive side as much as possible.
“Thank God it came when it did,” he said of Milton. “A week later we should have thrown away our traps because we could lose them all in the hurricane.”
The storms were “devastating” for the West Coast industry, said Holly Dudley, one of the directors of the Florida Stone Crabbers Association, based in Everglades City (the other directors are Kelly Kirk and Carrie Doxsee). Most of the Everglades City fleet limited the number of traps they dropped, so the season may be off to a slow start for them as well.
Yet she knows it could be worse.
“It’s catastrophic north of us, from Lee County to Tyler County,” she said. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen, but these crabbers are resilient, even if they started late. It won’t slow them down. They haven’t had a paycheck for six months, and we will resume normal operations when these hurricanes stop hitting us. We will catch crabs, but they may not be plentiful.”
If it turns out that there are fewer stone crabs available, the shortage may affect the price on the menu. Stone crabs are already expensive due to the limited season, labor-intensive harvest and high demand. The market price, which is usually negotiated between buyers and fishermen, has not yet been determined, but Palazon said prices last year were $20-$24 per pound for medium (about five to six claws); $25-$32 for large (four to five clutches); and $40 for jumbos (three to four claws).
Irene Guerrero of Holy Crab, a Coral Gables-based market that supplies stone crabs nationwide, expects a price increase in light of recent events.
“But that usually always happens at the beginning of a season,” she said, adding that Holy Crab will try to maintain last year’s prices.
There’s a silver lining to all this: Joe’s Stone Crab, the king when it comes to this particular crustacean, reports that it’s not worried about the supply of stone crabs and will be ready to go when it opens on October 17.
And although the first two weeks are difficult, everyone agrees that supply will eventually decrease as the weather calms down and prices generally drop as the season progresses.
Schwartz, whose Michael’s Authentic is about to see its raw bar come to life with cracking claws, says he’ll visit Joe’s a few times during the season because it’s “a great experience.” And even without worries about the effects of a hurricane, he has advice for stone crab diners.
“Wait until prices drop a bit,” he said. “And go somewhere where they don’t mess with it, where they take a good product and don’t screw it up. You don’t have to make it fancy. Break it up, make a good sauce and serve it fresh.”
