Crabbing

Crab Season opened July 1 and runs Thursday through Monday every week from now until Labor Day. While we ate terrific crab regularly for months while underway on the Great Loop last year from Florida to New York, we’re partial to our local Dungeness Crab, each of which produces almost a pound of sweet, succulent meat, unbeatable when fresh-picked and eaten with a little bit of butter.

Several times we’ve gone out on our boat with Bob’s sister Lynn and our brother-in-law David who live a couple miles up the beach from us. With 4 crab licenses and 7 crab pots between us, and Bob and David taking turns hauling the pots up on their 100 feet of weighted line, we can make pretty quick business of dropping, then later pulling, clearing, re-baiting and re-dropping pots, often leaving them overnight for retrieval the next morning.

Note the crab pot above has 4 Dungeness crab, but also a large 22-legged starfish! He got to live another day.

Siblings Lynn and Bob leaning on the transom watching David pull crabs out of the pots bare-handed inspired a chuckle out of Cathryn, imagining them in this same pose as 5 and 7 year-olds watching some fascinating spectacle.

The preferred method for removing crabs from the pots is to open the gate and shake them into a bucket below, but some crabs are far too tenacious in latching onto the pot, refusing to let go, so requiring hands-on intervention.

Yesterday we pulled 6 Dungeness crabs, all male and over 6.25 inches of course, and today we caught SIXTEEN! A legal limit is 5 per person/license per day, so we could have brought in 4 more had we been so lucky. Meanwhile, we’re anticipating some great crab feasts!