Crabbing for Dungeness Crabs on the Oregon Coast

A hug is a great gift – one size fits all, and it’s easy to exchange.

Justin at work setting up the crab pots.  He’s so good at this and just loves crabbing!

Okay, okay, I didn’t know how to title this one but I guess it really doesn’t matter.  I know we went crabbing and I know the crabs we caught are of the  Dungeness variety … thank goodness.  Well, I’m pretty fond of Alaska King Crabs too.

Jordie's idea of crabbing was texting.  She loves to eat the crabs but wasn't too fond of the idea of handling any of them.

Our crabbing started out a little rough but keep in mind two things.  One is we hadn’t used the boat since last year.  We hadn’t even gone crabbing with the equipment since then.  We had a few bugs to work out but we weren’t surprised.  We kind of figured Friday would be our trial and error day.  Believe me when I say it most definitely was.

Regardless of the activity around this little one, he wasn't going to let go of his new-found food!

Friday was a minus tide day and much of the bay is not under water during minus tides.  We decided to wait until the tide was coming in because getting stuck on a sand bar wasn’t something we wanted to do and there are quite a few sand bars out there.   However, the actual best time to throw our pots in is closer to low tide.  Oh well … we already knew that.  Not that it really mattered but we did know.

This was the first one to  find his new very temporary home in our boat's live well.

First of all, we knew we should be down by buoy 6 but we dwaddled (is that a word?) around buoy 20 and then around buoy 12 before we arrived where we first intended to be.  Buoy 6 is very close to the bar – aka where the bay meets the ocean.

This one was hiding from us but he didn’t hide for long!  Every crab pot you pull up has lots of crabs in it.  Jordan got pretty excited at times when the crabs were running around on the bottom of the boat.   Picking up live crabs isn't her thing.  She may like to go crabbing and watch others, but having them cooked and ready to eat is really her thing.  Just don't get too close to her with those pinchers.  Even though you might pull up a lot of crabs, you can only keep the large males.  We have a measure and we definitely don't cheat with that.  The fine is $300 per illegal crab.  It wouldn't take many to have a hefty fine. 

These are all the little ones that we throw back after taking the big keepers out!  I use gloves.  Justin just picks them up.  That was our job.

We also had a little trouble with idling down either of the motors but finally worked out a system around this when pulling in the pots.  However, by the time we had the issues worked out, Jordan was definitely needing to find a restroom.  That was it for the day.  We cooked our crab and got everything ready for the next day

Saturday we were going out again.  We had our gas tanks full, new bait and were ready to go.  This is absolutely so much fun!!

This is the deck at Brighton Marina … there’s a little store, a dock to crab from, and full hookup RV sites right at the water’s edge.  Similar deck chairs are at Jetty Fishery.  That's our favorite spot to get supplies, walk on the dock and just plain hang out.

Eventually, I'll be caught up with my blogs. They have been coming daily, fast and furious.  Daily blog titles are listed on the right side of the blog for the month they were posted in.  It's easy to track that way.