The stretch between the Cortez Bridge and Bean Point runs on two calendars for most of the year, one for the people who live here and one for the people visiting. Every October, a third calendar takes over both groups at once. Florida's stone crab season opens October 15, and it runs through May 1. That part is the same for every trap, every boat, and every seafood counter on this stretch of Gulf coast.
What isn't the same is when the claws actually show up on your plate. Anna Maria Island has three distinct supply chains feeding stone crab to the table, and each one runs on its own clock. Knowing which one you're standing in front of is the difference between eating a claw on opening day and waiting a week for the same thing.
The Date Doesn't Move, Even When the Season Gets Shorter
October 15 isn't a soft target. It's a fixed regulatory line set by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and it has held steady for years even as the season around it has shrunk. The harvest window used to run from October 1 through May 15, a full 32 weeks. In 2020, the FWC trimmed it to 28 weeks, moving the closing date up to May 1 to give egg-bearing females more time to spawn before traps go back in the water. The start date never changed. Only the tail end got shorter.
That matters if you're the kind of resident who circles the date on a wall calendar rather than a phone. The traps go in the water at the same point every year, which means the opening rush at every dock and every restaurant on the island happens on the same morning, whether the crabs cooperate or not.
Three Docks, Three Different Clocks
Captain Anthony's Stone Crab Store sits at 107 Spring Ave in Anna Maria, and it runs on the simplest supply chain on the island: one boat, one fisherman, decades of local water. Anthony Manali has been fishing off Anna Maria for 51 years, and what's behind his counter on October 15 is whatever came out of his own traps that morning. There's no wholesale network smoothing out a slow week. If the local water is producing, the claws are there. If it isn't, they aren't, and you'll know it by looking at the case.
Five minutes across the bridge in Cortez Village, Star Fish Company runs a different kind of operation entirely. Owner Karen Bell, who has run the dockside restaurant and market since 1996, also co-owns AP Bell Fish Company, the wholesale seafood house that feeds both the market and the kitchen next door. That means Star Fish Company's stone crab supply isn't tied to a single boat working a single patch of water off Anna Maria. It's plugged into a broader Cortez fishing fleet, which can mean claws show up there on a different schedule than they do at a one-boat operation a few miles north. Star Fish Company also has a track record of adapting its opening-week menu to whatever the season brings, adding a stone crab chowder to its lineup when it reopened after Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.
Then there's the third clock, the one running at Sandbar and Beach House, the beachfront restaurants tied to Ed Chiles's group on the island's north end. Chiles learned to work stone crab claws at Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach, and the mustard sauce served at his restaurants still traces back to that original recipe. What arrives on a plate at Sandbar during opening week is shaped as much by restaurant allocation and reservation demand as it is by which boat pulled which trap that morning. A table there on October 15 might get claws before a walk-up customer at a market three miles away, or it might not, depending on how the week's supply gets split.
Three operations, three ways of answering the same question. If you want the most literal version of opening day, the dock where the fisherman is also the guy behind the counter gets you closest to it.
What a Pound Actually Costs This Time of Year
Stone crab pricing runs by claw size, and the gap between categories is wide enough that it's worth knowing before you order. Based on last season's numbers, medium claws ran in the $35 to $45 per pound range, with jumbo and colossal claws pushing past $70. The bigger the claw, the fewer of them make a pound. Medium claws run six or seven to a pound, while a pound of colossal claws might only hold two.
| Claw Size | Approximate Claws per Pound | Typical Price per Pound (2025-26 season) |
|---|---|---|
| Medium | 6-7 | $35-$45 |
| Large | 4-5 | $45-$65 |
| Jumbo | 3 | $70-$75 |
| Colossal | 2 | $75+ |
Last season's prices ran high across the state, driven by tighter supply out of Gulf traps. That's not a fixed trend, though. Farther south, stone crabbers working the waters from Sanibel to Everglades City reported their strongest season since Hurricane Ian this past spring, with hauls running three to four times larger than in recent years and claw sizes bigger than usual. That's a different stretch of Gulf water than Anna Maria and Cortez, so it doesn't tell you what this season's traps off the island will produce, but it's a reminder that stone crab supply can swing hard from one part of the coast to another and one year to the next. The only way to know what a specific dock is charging this week is to walk up and look at the board.
If You're Dropping Your Own Traps
Plenty of people on this island don't buy their claws, they trap them, especially anyone with a dock or a canal lot where a trap or two is an easy weekend habit. The rules for that are simple but not optional. Anyone 16 or older has to complete a no-cost recreational stone crab trap registration through GoOutdoorsFlorida.com before dropping a trap in the water. Registration gets you a unique trap number that has to be displayed on the trap itself along with your name and address. Recreational harvesters are capped at five traps per person, compared to the much larger allowances commercial operations work with, and the daily bag limit is one gallon of claws per person or two gallons per vessel, whichever is smaller.
None of that paperwork changes when the season opens. It just means the traps that go in the water on October 14 are legal the moment the clock turns over, and the ones that don't get registered aren't legal at all, no matter how good the spot looks from your dock.
The Same Season, Different Mornings
None of this changes what October 15 means on paper. The season opens statewide on the same day it always has, closes on the same day it always has, and the size limits and trap rules apply the same way whether you're fishing off Anna Maria or the Keys. What changes is how quickly that first day turns into a claw on your plate, and that depends less on the calendar than on which counter you're standing at and whose boat feeds it.
Jessica Batten pays attention to these small seasonal shifts because they're part of what makes life on this island different from a week-long visit to it. If a stone crab dinner on opening week is part of your fall routine here, or part of what you're picturing when you think about a life on this stretch of Gulf coast, Jessica Batten is worth a conversation about what that life actually looks like, claws included.
