Commercial Dungeness crab season is under way, as the first boats in the San Francisco fishing fleet began unloading their catch Wednesday morning, meaning that fresh local crabs should arrive in Bay Area markets and restaurants as soon as Thursday.

But even though the commercial fishing season started right on schedule, a weather system limited the number of trips smaller boats could take to bring back their first catch of the season. That said, early signs of this year’s crustaceans are positive.

“From what I’m hearing, the availability is very good, the meat’s very good, the only thing is the weather,” said Tony Lam of Pucci Foods in Hayward, a seafood processor and distributor that supplies many restaurants and supermarkets. After fishermen and buyers settled on a price of $3 a pound, and accounting for transportation, cooking and cleaning, Lam said he expects to see prices for cooked and cracked crab starting at $5.99 or $6.99 per pound, depending on availability.

Grocers “don’t want it to be too high. They want to attract people into the store saying they have fresh, local Dungeness for the holiday,” said Lam, since Thanksgiving week is traditionally one of the biggest times for crab sales.

On Wednesday morning, Christian Cavanaugh and his crew on the Chasin’ Crustacean were on their second trip bringing in crab they had caught between Point Reyes and Pacifica, after starting to pull up traps after midnight. “The crab we’ve seen have hard shells, and they’re full of meat,” he said in a text.

However, the wind was coming in as he headed back to port. Weather made things even more difficult for Bodega Bay fishermen, said Mike Lucas of North Coast Fisheries in Santa Rosa, which processes and distributes seafood for restaurants and stores all over the Bay Area.

“It’s blowing up here on the Bodega side,” said Lucas. “There’s a couple big boats out, but we won’t see them for three days. The little guys — I don’t think they’ll start till noon tomorrow.”

Regardless of the weather, the on-time opening of the commercial crab fishery was good news to the local industry after the California Department of Public Health gave local crab an all-clear last week.

The department conducts safety tests on Dungeness crab every year before the commercial season opens, and crabs from Point Arena (Mendocino County) all the way south to Morro Bay (San Luis Obispo County) had tested clean of toxins since September. However, crabs from some areas of Humboldt County and farther north, where the commercial season hasn’t opened yet, still show signs of domoic acid, a potentially deadly neurotoxin produced by algae that shows up in shellfish.

A widespread algae bloom in 2015 that infected crabs with domoic acid delayed the start of the 2015-16 crab season until after the holidays. The toxin showed up again last year, temporarily closing an area of the coast from Salt Point in Sonoma County to north of Humboldt Bay. However, the industry bounced back overall, as fishermen brought in more than 21 million pounds of Dungeness crab, worth $66.7 million, to California ports in the 2016-2017 season.

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan