A late launch out of Everett at around 7:45 a.m. (missed the incoming tide) had me hoping that we hadn't missed out on our opportunity for our first crab of the new season. After running the slalom course through all the crab buoys at the mouth of the river, we had our first set of pots scattered in 25 - 60 feet of water by 8:30, and we settled down to bake in the steadily rising temps.

The first pull (9:30) was a good one with 17 keeper dungies and 5 red rocks. After that things slowed down considerably and it took another 4 hours to get our six limits of crab. We ended the day with 30 dungies and 11 red rock crab. Not to bad of a start to the season, although we had to work harder for these than we did last year on the opener.

Our bait was salmon carcases, turkey necks, and some surf perch that had gone bad after our last trip to the coast for razor clams. Surprisingly, the crab seemed to like the perch over the salmon, but the turkey necks out fished them both. Go figure! Another thing that I noticed was that as the tide changed and started going out, the crab moved shallow and the two pots we had in 25 feet of water started out fishing the deeper ones. That left me scratching my head a little bit too.

The super low tides made the boat ramps interesting when we pulled back into port, but our big Suburban with 4x4 got us out without any problems. Yea!

---