Tag Archives: fishing

The hunter-gatherer sailboat experience

Posted on by under living aboard, Musings, photos

While we do manage to catch enough to make us happy, we don’t claim to be great crabbers, shrimpers, or to have an ounce of real talent or luck when it comes to fishing. That is a good thing because we seem to haul up an awful lot of things that are not the intended targets. Trolling for salmon? Pull up some kelp. Trying for rockfish? How about some encrusted metal debris instead? The crab pots find us staring at starfish and sunflower sea stars or teeny little baby fish. The deep-set shrimp pots set for spotted prawns in the cold waters of Alaska have been our only consistent “good catch” methods aboard. Kinda far from where we are now though. When we set out for some hunter/gatherer time, we always wonder if we’ll be hungry unless we pull out the provisions we’ve packed onboard for the trip. Beryl is happy if she’s got her kitty kibble though. She doesn’t eat fresh meat, only highly processed dry stuff.

A Sunflower Sea Star

There are online prepper forums and sailing groups where a bunch of armchair sailors seem to be constantly chatting it up about how long various members could theoretically survive off the provisions they carry and the fish they catch. Months, years! by God, that’s their storyline. More power to ’em, they have more confidence in their hunter/gatherer skills than we do ours. David and I will just stick close to the supply chains and pray for world peace, thank you very much!

I enjoy fishing from the boat at anchor. Of course, I have yet to catch anything doing this, but ever hopeful…

While we were supposed to be catching rockfish, we were doing some environmental cleanup of the bottom here:

When trolling, it takes us no time at all to capture enough kelp and sea grass to avoid the risk of ever getting a fish on the hook:

If we do manage to lure something into our crab trap, it is sometimes a baby fish that manages to expire there, terrified of the sunflower sea stars who gravitate towards the bait pot. Of course, this is one way we do manage to get bait!

It only takes a few spot prawn to make for a good dinner for the two of us:

All cooked up:

And that which is left over makes for good bait in the crab trap too:

After the bait bucket…

Posted on by under food, photos, wildlife

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.

dave

A nice crab about 7″ measured across the shell. In Alaska you cannot keep one that is female or smaller than 6.5″

crab

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.

seastar

The cutest little starfish came up during our first ever crabbing.

starfish

David pulls up a catch with many crabs but they’re all too small to keep or they’re female.

many

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.

crab2

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.

prawns

The Bait Bucket

Posted on by under food

When you’re in the middle of nowhere it is actually sort of hard to find things to put in the crab trap bait bucket to attract the crabs. Especially if you’ve not caught any fish or crabs yet it becomes the chicken and the egg problem all over. Here I’m lucky in that the day before we’d managed to catch some spot prawns so I could use prawn heads in the bait bucket to lure in a crab or two.

The bait bucket

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