Every October, the same ritual plays out on the working waterfront just across the bridge from Anna Maria Island. Crabbers spend the last two weeks of September re-tagging buoys, patching traps, and hunting down bait that has gotten harder to find every year. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has drawn a hard line on the calendar: stone crab season runs October 15 through May 1, and nothing legal happens before that date.
But if you have lived here long enough to remember last October, you already know the calendar and the fishery are not telling the same story.
The Date Is Fixed. The Season Isn't.
Karen Bell has run A.P. Bell Fish Co. and the Star Fish Co. Market & Restaurant in Cortez long enough to know the difference between a legal opening day and an actual one. In the days before last season began, she told The Anna Maria Islander that her crabbers had their gear ready the way they do every year, buoys tagged, traps set. But being ready and the crabs showing up are two different problems.
They turned out to be very different problems. Within the first week of the 2025-26 season, Star Fish Co. and A.P. Bell had brought in only about 260 pounds of claws from eight or ten fishermen combined, a number so far below expectations that one crabber running a couple thousand traps landed just 25 pounds, not even enough to cover his fuel. James Gowett, who manages the Star Fish Co. market, put it plainly to the Islander: calm, clear water had kept the crabs buried, and the offshore boats running thousands of traps farther out simply take longer to come back with anything worth selling.
That is the part the regulation can't account for. October 15 tells you when it's legal to pull a trap. It says nothing about whether there's anything worth pulling.
What a Slow Start Actually Costs
The numbers from that first thin week matter if you're the kind of resident who plans a fall dinner around fresh claws rather than a vacation around them. Bell reported prices ranging from $23 to $46 per pound in Cortez and on the island that week, depending on size and how the claws were prepared. In a normal year, a healthy trap yields close to a pound of claws. In those early days, yields were running closer to a quarter pound per trap, a supply crunch that pushes prices toward the top of that range fast.
There's a second cost that has nothing to do with weather. Pigs' feet have long been the bait of choice for stone crab traps because they hold up in the water better than most alternatives. Bell told the Islander that more of the domestic supply is now getting shipped overseas, which has made pigs' feet scarcer and pushed bait prices, in her words, off the charts. A crabber paying more to bait a trap that's coming up light is not a recipe for a calm season, and it shows up in what you pay at the counter.
Then there's the year before that, which tells you the slow start isn't purely bad luck. The 2024-25 season struggled with what the trade calls floaters, claws harvested from crabs that had recently molted. A floater claw looks the part but carries less meat inside a softer shell, and it sells for less because buyers know the difference. Crabbers went into last season hoping for harder shells and better returns, and instead got a slow water year on top of it.
The Uncertainty Above the Water
There is a structural piece of this that has nothing to do with cold fronts or bait supply. Bell has also flagged a separate problem sitting over the entire industry: federal indictments involving five major seafood-buying houses in the state, tied to alleged price-fixing and antitrust violations. Her read on it is blunt. There are probably fewer than ten major dealers buying stone crab statewide, and legal trouble at that level tightens an already difficult business even further. For a market this small, losing even one or two major buyers to legal exposure changes what independent crabbers get paid, which eventually changes what shows up on a menu in Cortez or on the island.
None of this is the kind of thing a tourism site mentions, because none of it matters if you're only here for a week. It matters if you're going to be shopping this market every October for years.
Where the Catch Actually Goes
If you want to watch the season correct itself rather than just wait for a menu to update, the working waterfront in Cortez is where it happens first. A.P. Bell Fish Co. and Star Fish Co. Market & Restaurant sit next door to each other and buy from a rotating group of independent crabbers, so their daily supply is a decent real-time read on how the fishery is doing. Cortez Bait and Seafood, run by John Banyas, and Wild Fish Market, run by Brett Wallin, are the other two anchors of that same stretch, and both owners have been candid in local coverage about the season's ups and downs rather than papering over a slow week.
On the island side, Captain Anthony's Stone Crab Store has built its name on claws pulled from traps the owner sets himself, and locals treat it as a straightforward gauge: walk up, ask what came in that day, and you'll get an honest answer about whether the season has turned yet.
Once the claws are moving in real volume, they show up on the menus that have carried stone crab for years without much fanfare. The Sandbar and Beach House both source from local boats and put claws on the table as soon as there's enough supply to justify it. Blue Marlin, in its cottage on Bridge Street in Bradenton Beach, has served stone crab by the quarter, half, and full pound long enough that regulars know its rhythm as well as anyone's.
The Checkpoint That Tells You the Season Turned
There's a fixed date every year that works as a useful midpoint gauge, independent of anything the weather is doing. The Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival, which marked its 44th year this past February, is staged right at Star Fish and A.P. Bell and returns to the working waterfront every February. If claw supply and pricing have settled into a normal rhythm by then, the festival tends to reflect it, with vendors leaning into the domestic catch rather than talking around a shortage. It's as good an unofficial thermometer as the market offers, and it happens on your side of the bridge whether or not you ever plan a trip around it.
What This Means If You're Buying Claws This Fall
None of this is a reason to skip stone crab season. It's a reason to time it with a little more patience than the calendar suggests. If the first week or two after October 15 brings high prices and thin supply, that isn't a market malfunction, it's the fishery waiting on the weather to cooperate. A cold front that stirs the bottom does more to open up real supply than the date on the FWC's calendar ever will.
The people who get the best claws at the fairest prices aren't the ones who show up October 16 out of habit. They're the ones who check in with Star Fish Co. or Captain Anthony's a couple weeks in, once the crabbers have had a chance to prove the shells are hardening and the traps are filling the way they're supposed to.
That's the kind of thing you only know if you've watched this happen more than once, which is exactly the position most residents on this side of the bridge are already in.
If watching a working waterfront shape the rhythm of your fall is part of why you live here, and you're weighing what a move on or around Anna Maria Island actually looks like, Jessica Batten can walk you through it with the same local grounding. Start Your Island Search whenever you're ready.
