Stone crab season launches for Bradenton, Anna Maria Island restaurants this week

MANATEE -- Area restaurants have already gotten out the bibs, ordered the butter and poised their pencils to get their orders in for stone crab season.

Stone crab season officially begins Oct. 15, but Bradenton-area restaurants started getting ready as soon as the commercial stone crab traps were set on Oct. 5. Crabbers have checked the traps every few days since then to get an idea of what would show up on dinner plates early in stone crab season. The traps have to meet specifications set by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

"It's nothing to write home about" so far for Adam Ellis, owner of the Blue Marlin Grill on Anna Maria Island. Ellis' brother-in-law Mike is a commercial fisherman who brings his boat to the Blue Marlin to deliver the crabs straight to the restaurant. But he said it's early in the season and as the winds pick up, crabs drift to muddier waters, and they're able to catch more.

The season for the tender, sweet crabs ends in mid-May. Restaurants such as Star Fish Co. Market & Restaurant, Blue Marlin Grill, Swordfish Grill and Captain Brian's Seafood Market & Restaurant are preparing to fill the void left by Moore's Stone Crab restaurant, which closed in July.

"We had a lot of traffic anyway, but we'll probably have some (from Moore's)," said Star Fish owner Karen Bell. The crabs don't need a lot of fluff or preparation, Bell said. At Star Fish the chefs cook and crack the crabs before pairing them with lemon, mustard sauce or drawn butter for serving.

Ellis' kitchen removes all of the outer shell of the cooked crab, an uncommon practice for serving stone crab.

"Stone crabs are really thick and hard-shelled, so they're tough to deal with,"

Ellis said. "They can be hard to crack and kind of dangerous sometimes because the shells get really sharp." Though Blue Marlin "lets the crabs speak for themselves" as Ellis put it, they also use the tender crab in other dishes like stone crab mac and cheese.

The BeachHouse, Mar Vista and Sandbar restaurants owned and operated by Ed Chiles will do their best to get crabs on plates as early as possible Thursday, according to Caryn Hodge, marketing director for the Chiles Restaurant Group. At the three restaurants, stone crabs are served hot or cold in half-pound and one-pound plates.

Trapping enough crabs to feed the demand will be the challenge for restaurants this year and not just because Moore's Stone Crab closed. The past two years were the lowest on record for stone crabs, according to FWC; just under 2 million pounds of stone crab claws were harvested in the 2013-2014 season and an estimated 2.2 million pounds were harvested in 2014-2015. The 2000-2001 season saw a record harvest of nearly 3.6 million pounds.

This year's poundage should be roughly the same as the 2014-2015 season, according to Frank McCloy, the spokesman for FWC's research arm, the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, though the FWC doesn't make official predictions.

Statewide, harvests have decreased by almost 1 million pounds since the 2011-2012 season but demand has kept crab prices, McCloy said. In the 2007-2008 season, the 3.2 million-pound harvest netted $25 million. Last year's 2.2 million pound harvest clocked in with a $31 million value.

FWC's scientists are trying to figure out what has caused the crab harvests to drop. Ryan Gandy, a research scientist with the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, said the drop is caused by several factors and his team is still teasing out the biggest contributors. The crabs face an "intense, heavy fishing pressure" and fishermen have a high number of traps out to catch as many claws as possible.

Red tide was off the coast of Sarasota and Manatee counties, which could be good news for the stone crab season, even while it's bad news for tourism.

On Monday and Tuesday, "medium" concentrations of K. brevis or red tide were detected in two samples collected by Mote scientists near the lab's main campus on City Island in Sarasota.

"Red tide on the coast has a pretty good impact and a lot of times what you'll see is stone and blue crabs will go up because they can resist the red tide and it pushes predators out," Gandy said. "Like any population, environmental factors affect it."

Satellite images from Tuesday suggest the red tide bloom, visible at the surface, is present as a relatively small patch along Manatee and Sarasota counties. Sampling by boat will provide a more complete picture of what is happening offshore, where Florida red tides form, and beneath the surface, where satellites are unable to "see."

Janelle O'Dea, business reporter, can be reached at 941-745-7095 or follow her on Twitter @jayohday.

This story was originally published October 13, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Stone crab season launches for Bradenton, Anna Maria Island restaurants this week ."