OMG!!! What an amazing day! The weather was perfect and we were at the bait shop at about 8:30. We knew it would be a busy day on the dock - combo of it being a weekend day + and high tide at 12 noon (we are now experienced crabbers and know that it's best to fish "into the high tide" and if you time it so that your bait (mink carcus) is thawed and showing its guts at that time, you're destined for success).
So: Rental for one crab ring - $10; an Oregon State Crab License - $12; frozen mink carcus - $3; a measure thingie $2 - good to go!! I was sooooo excited - we had our camp chairs, and our little red cooler to safely confine our catch (it was with great angst that Dave removed all our cold beer from the cooler that morning - not at all convinced that we could ever catch enough crab to justify warm beer!).
So - females get thrown back (damn!) and males have to be a certain size (damn!) - could be discouraging, as the basket was often quite full, but most of the catch had to be thrown back. What became the most fun of all? Every time anyone pulled up their net, everyone else gathered around to see what they had, and what they got to keep. You only pull up every 20-30 minutes, and I thought I'd have plenty of time to read my book ... but between pulling our own trap, and joining in while all our dock neighbours pulled their traps - we didn't barely have a minute to call our own :)
So - we ended up with 5 beautiful Dungeness Crabs and sunburnt faces - all in all - PRICELESS
And after a full morning of crabbin' a fella gets a big of a hunger on - what better to eat than freshly smoked ribs, pulled pork or chicken:
After a very full day, the fruits of our labour:
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