Singing the crab fishing blues

I didn’t even take a fishing rod on one of the best fishing trips I’ve had this summer. No, I’m not noodling. You know, reaching down in undercuts and letting catfish bite your hand.

Mid-July, a friend (let’s just call him “Wes”) and I spent four days on a boat in the San Juan Islands, north of Seattle, fishing for Dungeness crab.

It’s called fishing, but we were really lowering a wire trap to the bottom hoping to lure some tasty crabs.

We timed our launch in Anacortes to coincide with high tide and the opening of the crab season in Area 7. The trap’s bait box is crammed with anything that stinks, including fish parts and chicken guts.

In a perfect world, the trap is lowered on leaded rope that prevents getting clipped from a boat’s prop. After two or three hours, you find your red and white buoy and pull up the trap.

Only males over 6-1/4 inches are legal. Sex is easy to tell by plates on the ventral side, and size is measured with a plastic caliper. The limit is five per day. We limited and cleaned and cooked crabs as we caught them.

Fishfull Faithull know Wes and I don’t live in a perfect world. Within hours, on the very first day, we lost the two traps we had taken from previous trips. Not in the boat — they just disappeared even after we marked them with GPS.

While it’s easy to accuse someone of swiping your traps, tides are generally the culprit. Traps are built to allow small crabs to escape, and the sides are tied with string that rots in time for crabs to leave lost traps.

Counting trips to town to buy traps, our trap count, at any one time varied from three to zero. Devising ways to find traps occupied most of our “wait” time.

We found one trap by setting a vertical line, then after tying another line as a radius, made circles with the boat to snag the rogue trap.

For another trap, we jerry-rigged a grappling line behind a downrigger weight. Several treble hooks were tied onto the 6-foot grappling line. Repeated passes over the suspected area snagged sea fans, starfish, a flounder and a dogfish shark.

The rest of the trip was usual and expected. We forgot the gas tank in the truck for the kicker outboard, got rainwater into the main gas tank, and Wes’ homemade buoy delaminated and wouldn’t float.

As Wes said every time we lost a trap, “Smalley, we’re still learning.”