Still enjoying the euphoria of my Lake Samish adventure, Sunday morning we got up and the wind was blowing. Didn’t think that we were going to take the boat out but my daughter didn’t work and had asked that we go crabbing. Soooo twist my arm, we were going crabbing. I stripped the riggers off the boat, securely stowed the crab pots and loaded the ice chest full of Cash-n-Carry frozen chicken and assorted fish carcasses that had been hiding in the bait freezer. After a quick stop at Holiday for my daughter’s license and a return trip home to get ours we were on the road headed for the launch at Cornet Bay.

With traffic and all we didn’t get the boat wet until 12:30. After launching we headed for our local favorite crab hotspot on the edge of Simik Bay. The plan was to run 4 pots, basically one crab pot buoy for each of us. All 4 pots were baited with a combination of bone in/skin on chicken thighs (cheap, cheap, cheap…) and an assortment of kokanee, salmon and trout carcasses. All the bait went in mesh bags and hung in the weighted pots. When setting the pots in north 8-1 I usually run up wind and while drifting in towards the bay, set the pots between about 80’ and 30’. Once set we do a short soak, maybe 30 minutes or so then we pull the string checking for large males. Once we figure out where or what depth the large males are doing crab things at we relocate all the pots to that area.

Time to pull the test set and pot # 2 (50’) has 5 large males in it. Even throwing back crab under 7” by the time we were done pulling the test set we had 10 of our 15 crab limit onboard. We reset all the pots in 45-50’ of water and after a 45 minute soak we started pulling the pots and stowing them. We were able to finish out our limits with 5 more 8” + crabs. All the crab gear was stowed away we went for a brief cruise and then headed back to Cornet Bay.

Our afternoon crab escapade was over and we had limits of 7-8 ½ crab. With a stop at Deception Pass Tours for a couple of mega size, small ice-cream cones (beware and prepared to share, these are huge scoops of uniquely flavored ice-cream in house made waffle cones) on the way back to Burlington it was a perfect family afternoon!

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