Meet the San Francisco Influencer Getting Gen Z Girls Excited About Crab Fishing

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n a rainy, windswept afternoon in November, Kaitlyn Bui stands near the water’s edge on Ocean Beach, casting a reel into the sea.

It’s a few weeks into the recreational crab fishing season here in the Bay Area, and at least a month before any local Dungeness crabs will hit the markets. So Bui is out here doing the same thing all the fishermen in San Francisco are trying to do — catch some fresh Dungeness for Thanksgiving. She looks like any other veteran crabber: rain jacket and winter beanie, waterproof waders tucked into fishing boots. Layers upon layers upon layers.

But if you’re active on certain corners of the Bay Area’s social media ecosystem (say, foodie Instagram or outdoorsy TikTok), then you might recognize Bui for who she is: the most popular crab fishing influencer in the Bay. The Crab-fluencer-in-Chief of Ocean Beach, if you will. She has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, and she’s even bigger on TikTok, where she’s amassed more than 440,000 followers and over 13 million likes. All told, Bui has done well enough that she’s able to make a full-time job of it.

On her social media accounts, Bui’s videos of herself fishing — almost exclusively for Dungeness crabs, almost always on Ocean Beach — routinely garner millions of views. Many of them hit the same basic beats: Here’s Bui going to the market to buy some fresh squid or mackerel to use as bait. There she is on the beach pulling in a crab that’s too small to keep, so she gives it a little piece of squid as a snack before releasing it back into the sea. Now, finally, she catches a keeper, which she brings back home to her mom, who cooks it up to feed the family. End scene.

The videos’ popularity has less to do with the fishing itself and more to do with Bui’s ebullient personality. Her trademark catchphrases are “oh my goodness” and “holy cow,” both of which she’s prone to saying, breathlessly and in full sincerity, multiple times in a single video. And when she does catch a crab — or, more recently, a huge striped bass — she’s so giddy, she can hardly contain herself.

Bui’s tagline on social media is “undercover crab fisherman” — because, as she explains, she doesn’t really look like anyone’s idea of a fisherman, much less a serious crab fisherman. She’s a young Asian American woman in a hobby that’s dominated by older men. She’s petite and unintimidating in stature — “5’3” on a good, sunny day,” she likes to say. And, to set her apart even from the food (and food-adjacent) influencers, she doesn’t even eat the crabs she catches. (She does love eating crab, she explains, but feels squeamish about eating creatures she’s seen alive — so she just brings them home for her family to enjoy.)

@kaitlyn_bui Do you want to see how my mom cooks the crab??😗🦀 #crab #crabfishing #crabbing #dungenesscrab #fisherwoman #fishingvlog ♬ original sound – Kaitlyn Bui

Those differences make Bui’s videos appealingly down-to-earth. And they’re helping to spark a new interest in Dungeness crab fishing in her tens of thousands of young, Gen Z followers — especially among young women who may not have had any previous interest in fishing.

“I try to make it look fun,” she says. “If it looks miserable, people aren’t going to want to do that. And there’s enough miserable stuff out there.”

Back on the water, Bui — who grew up on Taraval Street, just steps away from Ocean Beach — demonstrates her fishing technique: Like all the other fishermen on the beach, she’s fishing for crabs using a snare trap, essentially a little cage that she stuffs full of frozen squid. (On this particular outing, she’s using a Hello Kitty snare made for her by a local craftsman, Ken the Crab Slayer — one of the perks of being a high-profile influencer.) Attached to the snare are six plastic loops; if a crab reaches its claw in to try to eat the bait, it’ll get caught in the loops so you can reel it in.

Bui casts the reel out, sets the rod down into the long pole she’s dug into the sand, and waits for a few minutes before pulling in the line. If a crab has taken the bait, she reels it in. If not, she casts the reel out again and starts the whole process over again. Rinse and repeat, often for four or five hours in the cold and wind.About three hours in, Bui has only caught two little crabs that are too small to keep. But the lack of success doesn’t seem to have sunk her spirits at all.

“Who wants to be inside and warm?” she quips, cackling. “Where’s the sense of adventure in that?”

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ot every social media influencer has a compelling superhero (or supervillain?) origin story, but Bui remembers hers as clear as day.

Back in 2020, Bui had never tried crab fishing, or even really thought about doing it. (“I didn’t grow up in a very outdoorsy family,” she explains.) At the time, she was a pre-med student at UC Riverside in the thick of yet another semester of pandemic Zoom school. While staying at her parents’ house in the Outer Sunset, she started taking leisurely walks from Taraval down to Ocean Beach, mostly just to keep herself from going stir-crazy.

It was November, so the recreational Dungeness crab season had just gotten underway, and the beach was packed with fishermen. When she approached one of the old-timers, he explained that everyone was fishing for crabs, and he showed her the snare traps he was using to catch them.

Bui was fascinated. But at the end of the conversation, she recalls, the fisherman said something that stuck in her craw. “He was like, ‘It’s okay, though. Cute little girls like you don’t need to learn this. You can make friends with someone who’ll catch them for you.”

To Bui, it felt like a dare. “I was thinking, ‘I’ll show him. I’ll show him how I get the crabs!’” She went home, binged on crab fishing videos on YouTube and bought a bunch of gear. Then she went back down to Ocean Beach and fished all week, until she finally reeled in her first Dungeness. Just like that, she was hooked. “Everybody should have a chance to try this,” she remembers thinking.

Two more years passed, though, before Bui posted her first crab fishing video. By then, she was getting ready to move down to Riverside to start medical school through their feeder program. But she had started questioning her career choice. While she’d dreamed of becoming a doctor ever since she was a child — when her mother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer — she wasn’t enjoying her classes. In fact, she’d started doing content creation on the side, as a fashion influencer, posting videos on how to style cargo pants and low-rise trousers, just as a creative outlet.

Meanwhile, Bui says, none of her friends in college even believed her when she told them how she’d started crab fishing. So she decided to make a video to prove it — a two-minute-long vlog in which Bui baits her trap with squid, casts out her reel, gets her pants soaked in the process and, finally, catches a keeper, all with her trademark ebullience. She posted the video on TikTok last January, on the same account where she’d been posting her fashion content. She didn’t promote it, or even tell much of anyone she was doing it, she says, because she felt some sense of shame about being an influencer instead of, say, saving the world as a doctor. (“As Bay Area kids, we’re taught to shoot for the moon and land on the moon,” she says.)

That first video immediately went viral, with more than a million views. She posted a second crab fishing video and then a third, and those went viral too. In fact, of the first 10 fishing videos that Bui posted, eight of them all logged well over a million views. Brand partnership offers started trickling in. At that point, Bui thought to herself, “Is this, like, a job now?”

As it turns out, it was. She gave up her medical school plans for good, and she’s been doing crab fishing content creation full-time ever since. In the pre-med student to crab fishing influencer pipeline, she is (probably) one of one.

Bui certainly isn’t the only fishing influencer in the Bay Area — though, just two years in, she already has the most popular account focused almost exclusively on crab fishing. Right from the start, however, Bui saw that her approach was fundamentally different from most of the other big, prominent influencers in the space — accounts like Fisherman’s Life, which has more than a million subscribers on YouTube. First of all, Bui says, almost all of the popular fishing influencers are men, and their videos are mostly instructional — the expert guidance of a trained professional teaching you how to do a thing.

Bui enjoys watching those videos too, but, as she explains, “I’m definitely not trying to teach anybody. If anything, I’m constantly learning, still, and just trying to make sure I’m doing everything by the book.” She comes at it from the perspective of an eager, self-effacing enthusiast — and it’s that contagious enthusiasm that has made her videos such a hit.

“I never get anything right on the first try,” she says. “I’m definitely a try four, try five type of girl.”