It was a long winter of repairing and preparing our gear for the crab opener last week, so after a couple of small hiccups we were finally pots down in anticipation of restocking the freezer with some yummy crab.

Thursday (7/3): We set out 8 pots in depths of 35-65 feet, baited with chicken, turkey legs, humpy carcass, and even a trout thrown in just for the heck of it. Some of the pots were dressed up with salmon eggs soaked in Pro Cure Crab & Shrimp juice to put out a scent trail, to ring the dinner bell so to speak. On the first pull, every pot had crab in them and we were able to get 8 keepers. We re baited as needed and sent the pots back down. As we were getting pot #8 ready to drop my buddy, Rick, says, "oh no . . . it sunk!" Turns out I had attached a 50' rope onto a pot that we dropped in 63' of water. We did a grid search for about an hour and a half hoping we could see the buoy under the surface but visibility was only about 3-4 ft. so we took two different GPS readings, pulled the remaining pots, and were able to complete our limit of 20 dungies plus 5 red rock crab. Not a bad day, considering.

Friday (7/4): After cleaning and cooking the previous days catch and coming up with a plan on how we were going to rescue the pot that sank, three of us headed out at 4:00 a.m. with plans to do just that at the low tide. We arrived at the coordinates we took and put my buddy, Rick's, plan to retrieve the pot, into action. We clipped two empty pots together and attached 100' of rope with a buoy. Then we attached 175' of leaded rope to one of the pots and dropped everything over the side. Once the pots were on the bottom, we clipped the long line to the boat, and with me holding onto it near the water level we slowly motored out, allowing it to sink as much as possible till it was taut. Then we motored in a circle in hopes of wrapping the line around the rope or buoy of the sunken pot. About 1/4 of the way through the second loop I felt a "bump" on the line and then I could feel it slipping/dragging on something. We completed the second loop and then pulled both lines up together and after pulling up about 15' of line, I look down and there was the buoy, just under the surface! We pulled everything up with a big sigh of relief and found that the pot had about 20 crab in it, 8 of which were keepers! After we got everything untangled and baited, we set the pots out and were able to get our 3 limits by 9:45.

In spite of the "adventure" that we had, I rated this a 5 because we were able to get 7 limits over two days, plus 5 nice sized (6" or better) red rock crab. The Dungies that we kept were all between 6 1/2 & 7 3/4 inches, and we even threw back 8-10 that were legal size. Plans are in the works to go out again soon . . . hopefully without the extra salvage mission!

---