This paper reframes the ocean-grabbing literature by moving beyond accounts where small-scale producers and communities are portrayed as only victims of states and capital. While state and corporate efforts to 'grab' resources require critical attention, the literature on ocean grabbing risks obscuring the multidimensional relations of less powerful agents. This paper engages access analysis to reveal complex spatial, social and political processes of inclusion/exclusion and roles of agents such as small-scale producers, trade unions, fishing communities and Indigenous people. Using the case of a circumpolar shrimp species, the paper examines how actors and interests in Canada legitimize access by asserting a form of terraqueous territoriality through claims of adjacency rights - the idea that people living on land contiguous to marine resources ought to have priority in developing these resources. Assertions of terraqueous territoriality enhance opportunities for marginalized groups to gain state endorsement of resource claims, but such assertions are contingent on other factors and progressively tenuous as the mobility and geographical distribution of marine species increases. The paper suggests that contingent ecological and social forces that influence access should receive greater analytical attention, particularly as climate change transforms spatial relations between land-based interests and mobile marine species.