Waking up at the early-even-for-me time of 3:45 a.m. Sunday, it was good to see a string of brilliant crab boat lights out beyond the south side of Sand Island, with a couple more vessels in the Ilwaco channel. Later, I counted a dozen in the ocean off Seaview.

The morning was frozen, clear and calm — far better than many “dump days.” Sunday marked a first chance to start making some money after two months stuck in port. Most crabbers won’t have been to bed overnight before placing their first pots. Some will squeeze in more dump runs between now and Wednesday morning, when a nearly nonstop frenzy of harvest and delivery will commence and last for weeks.

With little or no sleep leading to exhaustion, the Dungeness fishery off Washington and Oregon is among the most dangerous jobs in the country. Winter weather and ocean conditions can be crazy. Fatalities are all too common, while crabbers barely bother mentioning all the back injuries, damaged fingers and a litany of other mishaps. Even so, there are plenty of local guys who don’t want it any other way. They see risk as the price of freedom.

Unlike the Bering Sea crab fisheries, TV hasn’t done much to glamorize our Dungeness crab fleet. Maybe that’s a good thing. While our crabbers deserve recognition, I suspect most wouldn’t appreciate their hard work and bruises being turned into somebody else’s entertainment.

All we who live in Pacific County should, however, routinely honor the crabbers, fishermen and oystermen who make their homes here. Driving up Pacific Avenue, it’s easy to think that tourism and real estate are where all our money comes from. And those businesses are important. But seafood remains a key building block of our economy and character. Without the solid income produced by the genuine hard work of our seafood workforce, this would be a hollow place.

My mom, an honest-to-goodness fourth-generation Wyoming cowgirl, used to ridicule people who pretended to know western ways without ever having bloodied a knuckle on a loading chute. “All hat and no cattle” is the famous insult for such pretenders.

Here on our coast, a similar expression might be “All boast and no boat.” This can be said of too many communities that have lost their real connections to the ocean and its traditions. Sanitized and lacking legitimate reasons to exist, they trade on maritime themes without any actual substance. Thanks to crabbers and others, our home is still as real as it gets. You can’t fake actual authenticity. We must do all we can to keep it this way.

In this week’s edition of the Chinook Observer, we’re planning coverage of the start of crab season, plus a profile of Washington Coastal Shellfish Manager Dan Ayres, who is retiring this week after a long career overseeing the state’s seasons for crab, razor clams and much else.

As always, you have my sincere thanks for supporting the Observer, a community project that aims to cover everything and everybody of interest in our fascinating communities.