It’s a bad year for crab lovers. Crustaceans off the menu at California festivals

Each year, Mendocino County celebrates its coastal catch with a crab festival in January. But now it has been forced to ditch the seafood star.

“Next year’s festival will celebrate Mendocino County’s plentiful ocean bounty, which is quite abundant, even without crab,” spokeswoman Bethany Deines wrote in an email.

It’s a bad year for crab lovers, and California has plenty who celebrate the holidays with cracked-crab dinners at home or in restaurants.

Dungeness crabs that come to Central and Northern California’s coast in winter have been off limits to recreational and commercial fishermen since Nov. 6. Tests show they are tainted with a toxic algae bloom linked to the warm waters brought on by El Niño.

The neurotoxin in the crabs can cause nausea, dizziness and even seizures in humans who eat them.

No one knows when crabs will get a clean bill of health and when the $60-million-a-year industry will restart.

So organizers of the Jan. 22-31 event in Mendocino are moving forward with what is now being called Un-Crab, Wine and Beer Days.

It will feature other seafood at the Everything But Crab Cioppino Dinner on Jan. 29 and an Anything But Crab Cake Cookoff on Jan. 30.

The inaugural Half Moon Bay Crab Fest, sponsored in part by beermaker Half Moon Bay Brewing Co., has switched course too.

Instead of the two-day festival, the event has been changed to a single-day SOS Seafood Fest: Sustaining Our Seas, on Jan. 30.

“It’s early, but there’s so much uncertainty and such negative publicity [about crabs],” spokesman Tim Beeman said. “No one has a crystal ball, and no one knows when they’ll reopen commercial crab fishing this season.”

Beeman said the revised focus of the festival is the “right event for the moment,” when El Niño and ocean warming are on everyone’s mind.

There still will be food tents and trucks as well as small-batch craft beers and something called SOS cocktails. The Crab Fest hopes to return Jan. 28-29, 2017.

VisitCalifornia, the state’s travel and tourism agency, says other than these festivals, it’s not aware of the crab ban having any major effect on tourism.

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