Monster Crabs and Happy Birthday, Tammi

Volunteers are not paid – not because they are worthless but because they are priceless.

There’s another birthday happening in our family today.  This time of year there’s just one of those right after another.  Today just happens to be the birthday of our youngest.  Now I’m not saying she’s young.  It’s just our youngest!   Happy Birthday, Tammi.

Happy Birthday to you.

Dungeness Crab

Guess what we did Saturday?  You’re right.  We went crabbing again.  It was another gorgeous day on the coast.  We had no choice.  We actually heard the crab calling to us.

The first plan of action was to get another 3-day crab license and bait.  Neither of those are sold at the park we are at.  We had to run down to Jetty Fishery again to do that.  We came back with fish heads and our licenses.  Thus, we were ready to go.

The difference between being on the water Saturday and earlier in the week when we had been in the area was that there were lot more boats and a lot more crab rings.  However, the weather was absolutely gorgeous and no huge swells like last time we made the trek in this direction.

We ended up with some nice sized crab this time.  There’s a lot of difference between crabbing off the dock and in a boat.  The ones off the dock were mainly female and small.  In the boat we got our share of small ones but we also saw some nice sized keepers.

Park crab cooker

Jerry learned to pull those crab pots up fast.  We sorted them on the bottom of the boat and tossed those back that weren’t legal.  Seagulls swarmed us for rejects.  We also had a couple Bald Eagles soaring over the trees.  It was definitely a nice day.

The park has a propane crab cooker.  We had it lit and waited and waited.  It was pretty slow in heating.  After about 45 minutes, it still wasn’t close to a boil.

Crabs are cooking!

Finally one of the other RV’ers parked next to the cooker set up his own crab cooker for us.  He has a nifty little burner for outside cooking and it heated up in no time.  If we were going to do much more of this, we’d certainly have our own little cooker.

The cleaning station

The park also has a fish and crab cleaning station down on the dock.  That was nice since it meant no mess at our site.

Our appetizer

We certainly had a mess of crab with enough left over for a crab salad the next day.

Clam for our neighbors

Our neighbors at the park brought over some samples of their day’s find.  We thought that was super nice.  First of all, we each had a large clam they had fixed for each of us,

They also brought seaweed they had collected and prepared Asian style.  I normally totally dislike seaweed.  I think I’ve had enough of that in my mouth over the years and not by choice.  The idea of eating it was never an option.  However, I felt compelled to be polite and try it.  Actually, I would have to admit that the way they had it fixed wasn’t bad at all.  At least I had a bite and tried it.  You realize, of course, that I still have no intention of having more in the future though.  It’s one of those mental things I guess.

Seaweed

This is how they dried the seaweed.  They hung it on their clothesline.  We’d never seen that before.  It was definitely interesting.


Events of Saturday, July 31st