Crabbing season starts in Washington State tomorrow. Will be heading out in the morning with the bambina’s and toss a couple of crab pots off the pier. Copper River salmon carcasses are thawing out for bait.
This will be our first time going out for the opening day. Best catch was a dozen keepers we got the day the season re-opened in the fal. I’m hoping there will be at least a couple big ol’ dungeness and red rocks ready to jump into our net and come home for dinner.
We discovered crabbing last summer and it’s been a great family past time. Almost all of the public crabbing piers also have nice playgrounds nearby. Head over, toss in the pots, go play, check the pots and toss them back in, go play, check the pots and toss them back in, go get something to eat, pull in the pots and head back home. Pretty good way to kill a few hours.
I was in Alaska, POW, two summers ago. The salmon fishing was nice but the more daily fresh crab meat than you could eat every evening was what made it great IMO.
Dungeness is by far the best crab, better than the king crab from Alaska.
I live near the mouth of the Columbia and we go out in a boat and drop sport pots in the estuary. The limit is 13 per person and it is not hard to get them. We drop the pots, wait a little and pick them up. Measure and throw back the under sized ones.
We are also just wrapping up clam season, until it opens again in October. I have several dozen razor clams in the freezer.
And the annual shellfish license fee that covers clams, mussels, crabs, costs an entire $7. Per year. You can’t even buy one Dungeness for that.
I love it here. I just have to mow my lawn in the rain sometimes.
I always crabbed in Alaska while everybody else in the party fished. Got pretty good at snagging Dungeness. Rotten chicken backs are the prefered bait for those.
I HATE cold wet deary cloudy weather but I must say the idea of all the crab I could eat did and does still tempt me If society ever does collapse for whatever reason I might well head up to the Pacific NW and live off crab (till the scurvy get me).
I’ve never been crabbing. I should do it. Family friend lives on Turkey Point and they’ve invited us to go out on the Bay with them a few times. I swear they had some of the best blue crabs I’ve ever had, or maybe they just tasted very good with lots of beer.
I’ve grown up around crabs and crabbing all my life and my take on it is this:
To go crabbing is to spend some quality time with your family early in the morning doing something very few people on this beautiful Earth get to do.
To cook crabs is to spend some time with your dad listening to stories that someday he won’t be around to tell anymore.
To eat crabs is to be forced to sit at a table and work hard for little nuggets of tasty food, enjoy a cold beer or two and swap stories with friends and family.
Just yesterday I was looking for something a bit different, as a little treat, and I had recently watched a PBS cooking show that featured crab recipes, a couple of which looked pretty friggin’ tasty, so I decided to check out the fresh lump crab meat (by a Maryland company called Phillips) was was shocked to find it was $11.99 per 8 oz. container!!!
I just couldn’t justify it to myself, and so I picked up some jumbo scallops instead.
(I am still jonesing for crab, and will have to figure something out soon, or I will be the laughingstock of Dopers everywhere by actually going to Red Lobster)
Just buy some frozen dungeness crab at the grocery store…where I am in the Midwest its something like 25 bucks for a box (trying to remember how many pounds that is…maybe 2?). I thaw it then cook it in the oven wrapped in foil. Turns out great!
Man, I hate to report we struck out. Not a crab, not even the non keepers that are too small or female. Not even a mutant starfish.
There was an ultra low tide around 9:30 that was 2.5’ below normal low tide. We didn’t get to the dock until about noon for a variety of reasons. Other crabbers reported that earlier was pretty good but it had slowed down by noon. We actually tried 2 docks.
Felt like Italians after their world cup loss 0-4 to Spain. My eldest gleefully pointed out this was the only time we’ve never caught anything if you include non-keepers.
2gigch1 - pretty spot on.
well, hell, crabbing is closed on tues and wed in these parts, so we won’t be out on the 4th of July. I guess next weekend we’ll try again. At least it will be summer then. Today was drizzly and high 50’s in the morning.
Seattle native transplanted in Denver. This was my recollection as well. Now, the seafood in Colorado is fair on a good day. Bless 'em, it’s just too far from the ocean for seafood to be really fresh. Crab around here is frozen snow or king–and that’s just fine, it’s all delicious. But while I’ll happily eat snow crab until I get sick, I remembered Dungeness being better. So it was with no small amount of anticipation I persuaded my bride to try the Dungeness this time when we went out for crab. As is the hallmark of our marriage, I was going to give her something heavenly she’d never had before. I was gonna be a hero. And I was gonna get sooooo…rewarded.
It was about 30 minutes later I learned that, while Dungeness is indeed a treat, it loses flavor FAST and does not freeze well. For months I endured bitter scorn for forcing the love of my life to ingest bland crab-textured dough instead of the sweet & juicy snow crab she’s clung to all her life. It took a vacation to the left coast and a serving of a fresh kill to gain something approaching redemption. So for now, I will continue to frequent the beef section in the grocery store and look longingly at the mockeries of halibut steaks, cod fillets, flash-frozen crab legs, and musky oysters & clams–sad in the knowledge that good seafood has been largely eradicated from my diet.
Unfortunately there’s no real crabbing here as far as I know, but in a few weeks I’ll be sitting on a deck overlooking the ocean, eating a pound of snow crab clusters and drinking an ice cold beer. Heaven!
I gotta agree on that one. Fresh Dungeness is to die for. Frozen Dungeness is okay but the frozen King is crab much better. Not much experience here with that but I wouldn’t buy Frozen Dungeness again unless it was the only crab like stuff I could get here.
When you say you use Copper River salmon for bait, you mean like heads and tails and entrails, right? Because Copper River salmon is more expensive than lobster here!
I reckon the price drops dramatically after they spawn. Salmon are not good for much more than garden fertilizer, bear food and crab bait after they spawn.
We’ve got rock crabs around here which are really lame compared to Dungeness. The shells are super thick and there’s not much meat. They are pretty delicious but are almost too much work. We’ve got spiny lobsters though!
Yep, we bought a couple of Copper River salmon and kept the bones and stuff. However, roasted salmon head can be quite tasty.
We get Red Rock crabs here too. I actually like the taste of Red Rocks a lot. Much more of a “sea” taste. But they are smaller, hard shells, tougher to eat, etc.
If society ever does collapse for whatever reason I might well head up to the Pacific NW and live off crab (till the scurvy get me).