The questions are coming in about what’s next — crab? what does the crabpot look like? and so forth. So here’s more of the story. After I shove some bit of bait in the bucket, I tie it into our (collapsible) single crab trap and if we’ve got deep waters, I bait a prawn trap too. Then David rows the traps out to their respective spots. Sometimes that’s far from our anchorage location. With tides up to 30ft and in 50ft to 300 ft of water it’s amazing that we manage to get the right quantity of line out. One time we saw our marker (a fender) floating slowly away near our anchorage on Admiralty Island. David did a row out to nab it and was rewarded with a curious humpback whale following along to check out David’s efforts. All was resettled shortly thereafter but we had, alas, no crab that next morning but just a tiny starfish.
David with crabpot all ready to row out and drop it off.
A nice crab about 7″ measured across the shell. In Alaska you cannot keep one that is female or smaller than 6.5″
If the row is especially long, we sometimes pick up the pot in the morning as we leave the anchorage with Mahdee. That is the case here and I’m standing nearby with engine running on Mahdee while David hauls up the crab pot.
Sometimes our catch includes a Sunflower Seastar. Oh so pretty on the ocean floor but they’re difficult to get out of the trap without hurting them. They prey upon baby crabs, too.
The cutest little starfish came up during our first ever crabbing.
David pulls up a catch with many crabs but they’re all too small to keep or they’re female.
This was one of the first crabs we caught and David’s saying “now what?”. I really didn’t know what to do with it but quickly learned that killing it outside with a quick whack to the belly was the kindest thing rather than dropping into the pot alive.
In addition to crab, the prawn trap just has smaller mesh and does a good job in deep waters of gathering prawns for us. Here’s a nice batch caught in the Misty Fjords National Monument. All cooked up and ready to go.
