Bottom Fishing and Overnight Crabbing

After we set our last crab pot on Saturday afternoon I hit the throttle to go home, but the boat felt sluggish and wouldn’t get on plane. I looked back to find that we were actually dragging a crab pot! I shut off the engine and raised it out of the water. I had apparently run over the buoy line while idling away and it got snagged on the motor, miraculously without getting spun around the prop. I managed to free it without too much difficulty, but I had dragged the pot some distance. On Sunday when we came back to retrieve it, it was empty even though there was lots of bait. We wondered if we had flipped it over or something. The other two were mostly empty, which surprised us a bit. We learned that leaving them overnight, even with adequate bait, doesn’t always yield more crabs. We’re not sure if our pots had been robbed, or if all the crabs just escaped. Out of our meager pickings we did have one keeper though, which made it worth our while. We decided to reset two pots with the remaining bait and fish for a while.

We had a little trouble finding a spot with as many bottom fish as the day before. but eventually caught our stride. Early on, one of our lines got snagged on something, perhaps a nearby crab pot. We had to cut it loose or else get our pole dragged overboard. We didn’t have extra tackle, so we were down to one pole. Even though it was supposed to be slack tide, there was a fairly strong current that rapidly moved our boat. We learned to fish in drift cycles, where we would place the boat in a strategic location and fish without power long enough to catch one or two. Then, when Hat Island started to loom large, I would restart the engine and go back to where we started. We had an anchor but have never used it; that’s on our list of next things to practice and learn. My girlfriend did most of the fishing – she savors the whole experience and never gets tired of it. Even with one pole we came home with nine more sand dabs and two Dungeness crabs. On one drift we spotted what I’m pretty sure was a small school of harbor porpoises.

On the half hour trip back to Everett, the water was smoother than it was on Saturday, and a dream to boat on. My boat is designed to be driven standing up, and it’s easier to look for obstacles that way too. I love the feeling of freedom that comes from bouncing along the waves in the middle of Possession Sound at 21 knots while standing on my feet. With two nine-foot fishing rods flying in the wind, I felt like I was living a Boston Whaler marketing video. We came across another school of porpoises on the way, or maybe the same ones. Both of us have now gotten our sea legs, and are now pretty comfortable being in big water in my small boat. That night, I was treated to a dinner of homemade crab cakes. When you have a boat, every weekend is a vacation. In July I logged nine trips and 12.7 hours on the engine, with 12 crabs and 22 sand dabs brought home. That’s a lot of experiences and memories for one month.