Big Haul of Dungeness Crab, and Sand Dabs Too!

On Sunday my girlfriend showed up at 8:30 with bells on, a good three hours before her usual arrival, and we got an early start. We are starting to venture farther away from Everett in search of more crabs and less crowds. After putting in, we went directly to Camano Head (a 40-minute trip in my boat) and dropped two pots in search of red rock crabs. She had never tried one, and I wanted her to have that experience. Then we traveled to another (undisclosed) location, dropped our other two pots, and fished for a while. We’re still going for sand dabs, although we have plans to hunt for bigger fish soon. We only had a few of the bait worms left, but it was enough. Two of our sand dabs were big this time, about 12″. Size makes a big difference when you eat them – there’s so much more of the delicious meat, and the bones are much larger and easier to handle. Then we returned to Camano Head to pull our first two pots. We had no keepers there except one good sized male red rock, which was old enough to have barnacles.

Satisfied, we came back for our other two pots and found them to be very productive. So, we re-dropped all four there and then headed for Langley, where we got the very last available slip. As we were docking, I heard them turn away another boater on my radio. After a good lunch, we retrieved all our pots and partook of our bounty. We had so many crabs that it was quite a bit of work to sort through them all. At the end of the day we came home with nine Dungeness, one red rock crab, and four sand dabs. If you’ve never tried red rock crab, they are a little smaller than Dungeness and even meaner. Most people consider them to be bycatch, but some of us appreciate how good they are. They have small legs but huge claws. Ours had a very hard shell, but once we finally broke through there was a huge solid piece of tasty claw meat inside. Red rocks have a sweeter tasting meat that some people like even better than Dungeness.

How many “best day evers” can you have in a row? We’re trying to find out. The only downside was that I got a second degree sunburn on the back of my head. I try to be absolutely meticulous about applying sunblock, but the ball cap I was wearing had a hole in the back. I hadn’t realized just how low my hair has receded, as I don’t spend a lot of time staring at the back of my head. I didn’t even notice it until the following morning. Now I have a really weird tan line on my head. Next weekend I’ll be more careful. Speaking of which, we have a very different sort of fishing adventure planned for then. I’ll keep you posted.