LEAD STORY: Giant crabs export gold

ROGER MORONEY
MORE than 100km off the east coast and nearly a kilometre under the surface of the Pacific lies what may well become a valuable new fishing resource and a lucrative export earner for Hawke's Bay and the country.
For the past five days deep-sea trawler Perserverance has been in pursuit of two species of New Zealand ice crab _ the king (which can span 1.5m from leg tip to leg tip) and the smaller red, or chaceon, crab.
On the international market the crabs can fetch up to US$45 ($57) a kilogram.
The expedition, which ended with the arrival of the Napier-based trawler at the Port of Napier on Monday night, was mounted by a specially set-up company called CrabCo, which is made up of the four main players in the country's fishing industry.
Company chairman Tony Craig said the expedition had effectively been an experimental one as finding the great deepwater crabs in harvesting numbers was at this stage ``hit and miss'.
The expedition, which Mr Craig said took place in weather which gave the six-strong crew led by Napier skipper Wayne Shapcott ``a hammering', had unfortunately been more a case of miss than hit.
``We'd have liked to have brought in 1.5 tonnes as that's what we need [to make it viable].'
However, after laying some 240 pots, on long-lines of 70 pots to a line over the past week in rough seas, the return was just 150kgs.
The crabs, which had been kept alive in storage tanks aboard, were unloaded this week at the port for processing at Moana Pacific Fisheries at Awatoto.
The company comes under the Aotearoa Fisheries umbrella _ one of the four companies which pooled their crab quota to form CrabCo.
While the expedition may not have been a good earner it still provided the company with valuable research into the eating, moving and habitat traits of the giant crabs.
``We don't know much about their annual movements at all and it is like finding needles in a haystack. We have to find out more about them,' Mr Craig said.
Despite the poor initial haul he was optimistic the crab industry could become a viable commercial enterprise.
He described the expedition as a South Pacific version of the crab fishing season in the Bering Sea off Alaska which was profiled in the television documentary series World's Deadliest Catch.
In fact the fledgling Kiwi operation attracted the attention of one of the Bering Sea trawler skippers, Sig Hansen, who visited Perserverance to check out its gear and catch rates when it was in Auckland late last year.
Mr Hansen believed the fishery could be ``very promising.'