RV Fun Trips --- Our Crab Fishing Adventure -- 1998 ---

Our Crab Fishing Adventure
September 1998
Page 5

Wednesday 9-16

It was another early morning, but not as early as yesterday. I was up and around before Tom this morning, so I went over to the office to talk to the woman who seems to run the place, her name is Charlene.

The office of McKinley’s Marina and RV Park

While I was there, I met a man from England named Maurice. We talked a bit about the two different ways the name Maurice is pronounced, the English pronunciation as compared to the French pronunciation. Maurice said that the English pronunciation was the more manly way of saying his name. This was before he knew that my name is also Maurice pronounced the French way. We had a laugh after he found out about my name. He said he hadn’t met a man named Maurice (Pronounced the French way) until he came to the United States. (This story is a lot easier to tell verbally than in print.) I talked a while longer with Maurice about fishing, and then I went outside to see if anyone from our group was around.

When I stepped outside of the office, I saw Wally working on Harry’s boat while waiting for him to come down to the dock. Wally decided to go back up to our camp to get Tom and Harry moving. We finally were on our way out to the bay, this time each boat had another crab trap, thanks to Harry’s friend, for a total of three traps per boat. While the men of our group were out working hard to bring home the crabs, the women of our caravan went shopping again today.

Beginning another day on the bay

We went to the outer bay to begin our fishing for crabs, but we had a slow start. The first couple of times we checked our traps, there were no critters to be had. As the tide picked up, the crab count increased until we were getting fairly big loads of crabs. Our largest number in one trap was approximately 15 or 16 crabs with 7 keepers. That was a heavy trap.

From the first day, Tom would ask me as I pulled a trap up, "Is it heavy?" I would tell him it felt heavy and the trap would have only a few crabs in it. Tom said that I would know when a trap was really heavy. He was right, when I pulled up the trap with 15 or 16 crabs; it was a very heavy trap. From then on I was able to tell when we had a big load of sea spiders in the pot.

A nice haul of crabs

There was one thing that gave us a minor problem with the crab pots. Seaweed would collect on the wires of the pots and sometimes the seaweed would wrap around a trap door and hold it open.

One time I pulled up a pot and I could see a big crab trying to get out through an open trap door. Because the crab was so big, I did not want to lose it. So I pulled the trap in as fast as I could, but just as the trap was about to come in the boat, the escaping crab dropped back into the water. It was too big to let it get away, so I leaned over the side of the boat as far as I could to try to grab the critter as it sank. I didn't care about getting wet; I just didn't want a crab that big to get away. Now keep in mind that only male crabs can be kept and I did not have an opportunity to determine the sex of the crab that was now headed back to the bottom of the bay. So I was reaching for a crab that might not be a keeper.

In the background, I could here Tom yelling "Don't do it, it isn’t worth it. It isn’t worth it. Let it go, it isn’t worth it." We both started laughing when I came back in the boat clinging to a really big crab. Tom quickly flipped it over, to our relief; the crab was a keeper. My coat was wet up to my shoulder, but I got my crab the hard way.

A little bit later, Tom cancelled out my effort by accidentally throwing away a keeper crab. It was a situation where I had pulled up a very full pot. Tom dumped the contents of the pot on the bottom of the boat. Then he threw the small crabs over the side one at a time. There were about 10 or 12 crabs left that appeared to be large enough to keep.

Tom would grab one critter at a time to flip it over to see if it was a male keeper. Since there were so many to check, Tom got a rhythm going. He would say "Female" and toss the crab back in the bay. When he said "Male" he would throw it to the other side of the boat to keep it separated from the unsorted crabs. So it went something like this, "Female (toss), female (toss), male (keep), female (toss), female (toss), male (keep), male (keep), female (toss), female (toss), male (toss), whoops! Oh no!"

Tom got out of sync and tossed a very nice sized keeper. We both got a good laugh out of it. So, with the crab I caught by hand and the one Tom threw back in the water, we came out even. It all added to the fun of the day.

We ended up catching our limit of 12 crabs each. So we began sorting, that is where you keep fishing so if you catch a big keeper, you can then put a smaller keeper back in the water. The result is a catch of bigger crabs. It wasn't very long until the tide change brought a slack of crabs being caught, so we returned to camp for lunch. Our haul, for this day, was 48 crabs.

For our lunch, Harry made some very tasty ham and cheese sandwiches with just the right amount of mustard. After lunch, Tom and Wally went back out in the afternoon to do some more sorting. Harry settled down for an afternoon nap. I went to our motorhome and checked my email and wrote down a few notes.

Then the women came back from another day of shopping and sightseeing in Newport. After his nap, Harry took Shirley out on the bay to try her hand at crab fishing.

Harry and Shirley going crab fishing

Cathie wanted to cook more crabs for tonight’s meal. So I retrieved 12 crabs from the live storage trap and took them to be cooked by the campground staff.

Gathering crabs for the cookpot

While the crabs were cooking, Kay, Nora, and Cathie picked a big bowl of wild blackberries for this evening's meal. The blackberries were at their peak of flavor.

Kay gathering wild blackberries

Just as the crabs were about to finish cooking, Cathie went over to the cooking pot to take pictures of the crabs cooking.

Fresh cooked crabs in cooling tank

Then it was time to clean the freshly cooked crabs. Since the number of crabs was small, I was able to clean them while Kay and Cathie took pictures of me performing the cleaning process.

One man crab cleaning operation

Again, the large school of small fish, below the cleaning station, went into a feeding frenzy over the crab scraps falling into the water. When I finished the cleaning of the multi-legged dozen, we iced them down and set them aside to be consumed at the evening meal.

With the freshly cooked crab on ice, Cathie, Kay, and I went into town with Nora’s car to pick up a few supplies. Kay and I needed to buy an inexpensive ice chest to take our share of crab home to California. After finding the ice chest, we bought a bundle of firewood. Cathie picked up a second bundle to make sure we had a nice fire tonight.

When we returned to camp, the rest of our crew was coming back from an afternoon of crabbing. We all went down to watch as the boats returned to the dock. To our surprise we saw Tom towing Harry’s boat back to port. It seems the engine on Harry’s boat would not start.

Tom towing Harry’s boat in to port

When they all were back in port we found that Shirley came in with half of her daily limit of crabs while Tom and Wally came up with zero. So we had another six crabs to put in the live storage trap.

Crabs stored in a live trap

Our total take for the week was 84 so far. Wally worked on Harry’s outboard engine to try to find our what kept it from starting. Wally suspected the engine was flooded. This makes it very difficult to start with a pull rope.

The evening meal would be a surf and turf meal. I ate one crab and a small size steak with a salad and baked potato. Because we started our meal a little late, it got dark enough to make it difficult to see well enough to crack the crab properly. I brought out my fluorescent lantern to light up the table area. It seemed like an appropriate form of illumination for a camp made up of motorhomes with all the comforts of home.

We had a nice campfire to finish another fun day. We just sat around the fire to visit for a while before turning in to get some sleep.