Commercial Dungeness crabbing boats in Oregon have a three day window to set their traps before they can begin their harvest at 9:00 a.m. on Dec. 16 , so crabbers will begin setting their traps on Saturday morning, Dec. 13.

In past years, crabbers negotiated a base price for crab with processors and distributors before leaving port, but so far this year, the industry has not been able to collectively agree on a price.

Poggy Lapham is the captain of the Newport-based Michele Ann and will be headed out to set traps anyway.

“It's a really unfortunate situation we're in with not having an established price,” Lapham said. “This is something we haven't done in my career. I've been fishing for 20 years, so I guess we're going to try it, and hopefully it works out for us. But there's a lot of

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