Crabbing for Dungeness Crab Newport Oregon 2026
Newport, Oregon’s Yaquina Bay is one of the best crabbing bays on the entire Oregon coast. One of your favorite adventures on the Oregon coast will be spending the day crab fishing and then eating your catch for dinner. Nothing beats fresh crab straight from the ocean waters.
Newport has been called the Dungeness Crab Capital of the World. Newport’s Yaquina Bay is teeming with Dungeness crab. Commercial crabbers catch literally tons of Dungeness crab offshore in the Pacific Ocean, but there are plenty of crab left for us recreational crabbers.
In this article, I’ll walk you through how to go crabbing in Yaquina Bay.
How do you plan your Newport crabbing trip?
Learn the current regulations.
Decide if you’ll be crabbing from a boat or from shore.
Obtain the right gear.
Set up and bait the traps.
Check traps and harvest the “keepers”.
Enjoy a tasty crab dinner.
Crabbing regulations: license, size, limits
Shellfish License
You’ll need an Oregon Shellfish license. These can be purchased at the marina store where you rent your boat or crab rings. You can buy a license before you go through the ODFW (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife) website or ODFW app. The local sporting goods stores and some stores like Walmart and Fred Meyers also sell shellfish licenses.
In 2026, an annual shellfish license is $13 for an Oregon resident, or $37 for nonresident. You can also get a 3 day nonresident license for $25. Kids under 12 don’t need their own license (but can take their own limit of crab). Kids 12-17 can get a combination fishing and shellfish license for $10 (resident or nonresident).
Limits and Size
Most of the crabs you’ll catch in Yaquina Bay will be the large, delicious Dungeness crab. You can only keep males and they have to be a certain size. Bring a simple crab measurer to ensure the crabs you keep are large enough.
You can tell the male crab from females by looking at their abdomens. The females have a wider, rounder abdominal “apron” than the males. (Photo below from ODFW).
Your male Dungeness crabs must be at least 5 3/4″ behind the spines. The daily limit is 12 Dungeness crab per person.
You might also catch a few red rock crabs. They’re pretty tasty but smaller than the Dungeness. The limit on the red rock crab is 24 per person per day (any size or sex). You don’t want to keep tiny red rock crabs though – it’s just too hard to get the meat out of those small legs.
Biotoxins
Check the Oregon Shellfish Biotoxin Hotline 1-800-448-2474 or website for biotoxin information before you go. Recreational Shellfish Biotoxin Closures webpage. If there is a biotoxin warning, don’t eat the crabs! These toxins cannot be removed by boiling or freezing the crab meat.
Crabbing from shore or by boat
Do you want to rent a boat to crab in the bay, or will you just drop your crab traps from a dock or pier? Crabbing from shore is cheaper and obviously requires less equipment. Crab fishing by boat allows you to move around to where the crabs are but you have the added expense of the boat rental and the responsibility of operating a boat on the bay.
Crabbing from shore
You can rent equipment and do your crabbing from the public docks. You can crab from the Bay Street Pier or Abbey Street pier on the Bay Front side of the bay.
Another great place to drop your traps is the Port of Newport public fishing pier on the south side of the bay (across the bridge) near the marina. It’s just to the left of the old Rogue Brewery.
The municipal fishing pier is a public access pier only. There are no equipment rentals available at the pier itself.
There is now a fee to park in the parking lot by the pier ($7-$10 for the day). You can find public parking further down the road, but you’ll have to make the treck with all your gear.
The pier has a fish cleaning area nearby as well as restrooms. If your kids don’t have lifejackets, you can get loaners by the boat ramp on the other side of the marina.
Map: Newport Marina Store and Yaquina Bay access
The following google map shows the location of the marina store. To the left of the marina in the picture, the crabbing pier is the line that juts out into the water, almost parallel to the bridge.
Crabbing by boat
Bring your own boat or rent one for a day (or half day). We loved crabbing so much the first time, we bought a boat and do it all the time now, but starting out we rented a boat a few times from Newport Marina Store and Yaquina Bay Charters.
You get to cruise around the bay, enjoying the views of the bay, the Historic Bay Front, commercial fishing boats, and the striking Yaquina Bay Bridge.
You’re also likely to see sea lions frolicking in the water and sunning themselves on the rocks and docks. You may encounter a seal or 2 as well. They’re cute, but they like to follow you around and eat the bait out of your traps. (They like fish but not chicken). It helps to have your bait in a bait bag inside the trap so the seals can’t steal it.
Boat out onto the bay, drop the baited crab rings, then circle back to pick them up.
Search through the crabs in your crab ring and find the keepers – ones legal to keep. Re-bait the rings with fresh bait, and repeat the process until you’ve gotten your daily limit or your time runs out.
Equipment you’ll need for crabbing
Boat rentals are available at the Newport Marina and the Embarcadero. Your boat rental will include the boat, crab rings, life jackets, bait and crab gauge. The rental place can also give you helpful tips. They probably know where best places to go are on that day.
If you’re crabbing from the pier, you can rent crab rings at the Newport Marina Store or the Embarcadero. Crab ring rentals include rope, buoy, bait and measuring gauge.
You can also buy your own rings locally. Englund Marine sells a crab ring for about $40, but you’ll also need rope and a buoy, bait, and a measuring gauge. It’s a good investment if you think you’ll go crabbing more than once.
Of course you’ll need bait. Rentals will include bait, usually fish.
If you brought your own traps you’ll need to supply your own bait. Pick up some chicken from the store. Drumsticks or leg quarters are cheap and easy to handle. You can also use fish carcasses retrieved from the garbage can by the fish cleaning table.
Crabbing rentals don’t usually include gloves, but I highly recommend wearing them. Gloves protect your hands from rope burns, cold water, and crab pinchers! I like the blue rubber Vinylove fishing gloves available from England Marine near the Embarcadero. They’re less than 5 bucks a pair and end up being handy for a lot of other things too. They have fancier and more insulated gloves, but these do the trick for me.
When is the best time to go crabbing in Newport, Oregon?
When is the best time of year to go crabbing?
The best time of the year for crabbing is in late summer or the fall months when the crab are the most full of crab meat. The local rule of thumb is “any months that end in R.”
We crab all year long and find the dungeness crab tasty at any time of year. Even if the meat yield is lower in the summer, there’s still plenty of that succulent crab meat.
Commercial crab season in Oregon is from (around) December 1st to August 14th, but recreational crabbing season is year round in the bay.
When is the best time of day for crabbing?
The best time of day for crabbing for Dungeness crab is around slack tide. This is the time (about an hour) before or after low tide or high tide. Because the tide is not rushing in or out, the crabs are feeding at this time. The best tides are when the tides are neither particularly low or very high. Because the incoming (or outgoing) tide is not as strong, the time of slack water lasts longer.
How to crab from a boat
It’s best to have at least 2 people crabbing from a boat. One person can steer the boat while the other drops and pulls the traps.
From the dock, follow the map to the best crabbing areas. Don’t go under the bridge toward the ocean. You’re not allowed to take rental boats out of the bay and the water is much rougher towards the ocean.
Keep in mind Yaquina Bay is a working harbor for local fishermen, charter boats and OSU and NOAA research vessels. Stay out of the main channel and pay attention to other boat traffic.
Drop your rings
Find a place to drop your rings or pots outside the main channel and away from other boats. Yaquina Bay is a large bay with plenty of spots for many people to be crabbing at once. We’ve often had the best luck dropping our pots near the blue water tank on the east side of the bay, but the best spot changes from day to day.
Oregon Fish and Wildlife has a good map of Yaquina Bay which shows where to find crab.
Drop your rings. The ring will be flat and open on the bottom of the bay. Hungry crabs will walk onto the ring and start munching on the bait.
When you drop your rings, take note of the color and numbers on the buoys. Other people will have rings out here too, and you need a way to tell which ones are yours.
Wait about 15-30 minutes until you return to check for crab. If the traps sit much longer, the crabs will eat your bait and leave before you get back.
Pull your rings
When you return to pull up your ring, grab the buoy rope with the hook. Check the number on the buoy to make sure you’re pulling up YOUR ring, not someone else’s.
Pull up the trap quickly, pulling on the rope consistently. You don’t want to relax the ring and allow the crab to swim away. Haul the ring into the boat and see what you caught. If your trap is pretty full, this can be kind of a hectic moment with crabs running around the boat.
Sort your crabs
To pick up a crab, grab it from the back so its big front claws can’t pinch you.
Any females and obviously small males you can throw back immediately. (Well, not so much *throw* as gently drop back into the water). The rest of the male crabs you’ll have to measure to see if they’re legal to keep.
A legal Oregon Dungeness crab measures at least 5 ¾ inches between the flat parts behind the spines. If the crab doesn’t fill the gap in your crab gauge snugly, it’s too small. If you can’t get the measurer around the flat sides, congratulations! You’ve caught a hefty Dungeness crab for your dinner.
Keep your catch in a bin or a bucket. You can use a cooler if you’re opening it often and allowing the crabs to breathe. Or prop it open a little. You want to keep the crabs alive until right before you clean them.
Rebait and repeat
After returning any females and small crabs to the bay, rebait your ring if necessary. If you had a good haul, drop it again in the same place. If there were no crab in the ring, try another spot. Sometimes just moving a few yards can make a difference.
Move on to your next ring and repeat the process above.
If you have 3 rings, you’ll get on a pretty good schedule of pulling, harvesting, re-baiting and moving on. That takes about 10 minutes, then a little travel time to the next ring. You’ll just circle back between the rings over and over.
We like to use crab pots, which are enclosed crab cages. The crabs can’t leave the pot after they’ve entered, so you can let them sit longer. But before we bought the more expensive crab pots, we caught many limits of crab using the crab rings.
Return your boat, keep your crab
When you’ve caught your limit or your time runs out, return the boat to the dock where you will meet the rental people who will pick up the boat.
How To Crab from Shore
The steps are basically the same. Drop your pots from the docks. Wait a while, maybe 15-20 minutes. Pull up your pots and sort the crab.
You can return to the rental shop to clean and boil your crab. It’s nice to leave your mess in their garbage. And use their giant boiling pot.
Or if you’re heading home to cook your crab dinner, you can just clean them and pack in ice in your cooler. Only do this is you are going to cook them TODAY.
Crabbing in Yaquina Bay is an awesome Oregon Coast adventure, and enjoying a fresh Dungeness crab dinner is a fantastic reward for your day’s work.
Recipes to come:
Steaming Dungeness crab.
Dungeness crab alfredo pasta.
