Crabbing can be one of the most fun things to do as a family on Puget Sound.
If your kids are like mine, they don’t love downrigger trolling or pulling up shrimp pots from 275 ft, but the much more relaxed and potentially faster action of crabbing is more their speed.
In this post, we will cover the crabbing report from the opening day on Hood Canal and some ideas for making crabbing fun for the whole family.
As you may have read in our post about the 2019 crab season, there are several ways to make crabbing a fun family outing. Checkout the below video to see us having a great time while crabbing on the opener:
In the above video you can see a few things about what we did:
- I woke up earlier and launched the boat, set a few crab pots (there’s a limit of 2 pots if you are by yourself) before my family ever arrived. Doing this allowed my wife and kids to get some extra sleep and me not to be struggling with not getting on the water as early as I would prefer.
- We had food and music. Providing easy and even healthy snacks on a trip is a great way to keep everyone engaged while pots are being set or soaked. The music probably sounded pretty loud in the video, which is a tribute to this awesome Bluetooth speaker that can provide some decent volume in a small package.
- Have the kids grab the buoys with the crab hook, pull up a pot, but also, anchor up in 50-60 ft of water and drop the folding traps baited with a drumstick and have them check it every 3-5 minutes. We even got a dungie keeper doing that! Sometimes it starts slow, but if you get 2-3 of them going, it can really attract some crab to the area and get a good feeding frenzy going.
Let’s talk about the actual crabbing report. What we experienced, what I heard from others back at the launch, and what I’ve heard from yet others in my “fishing network” since then is that Hood Canal has been a bit slow for crab.
Especially compared to 8-1, 8-2, 9 and northern parts of 10. With that being said, getting 5 Dungees and 10 Red Rocks was plenty of crab for us to have a big meal and several other meals after that. Those numbers won’t impress anyone on social media but are still a good haul of fresh crab. How much crab do you want to freeze and eat later anyway?
We started out crabbing in Seabeck harbor, around the corner from the launch and had some success on the NE side, picking up our first keeper dungie, and picking up several keeper red rocks on the NW side.
While we like Red Rocks, we still prefer the Dungeness, so we consider them a good consolation prize. If you are like-minded and are pulling up red rocks in your traps, it’s time to move. Those ornery red rocks will and do muscle the Dungees out of any area they want to take over.
We tended to find Red Rocks in shallower areas and the Dungees at the 65+ depth line.
We moved on from Seabeck Harbor pretty fast and moved north to Big Beef Harbor. We had most of our success in this area. We anchored up in about 60 ft of water dropped the aforementioned folding traps and sorted through crab until we got several more keepers. Another thing that helped us with that was our anchor rope bag
We were able to leave our anchor in place, attach a big shrimp pot buoy to the anchor rope bag, go check our pots, and then get right back on anchor with little to no hassle.
One of the things we were quite surprised about was the size of some of the Red Rocks. We were getting no joke 7″+ across the carapace red rocks. Usually we get keepers in that 5-6″ range.
A big Red Rock can provide quite a bit of easier-to-get-at meat, though still not as nice as a big Dungeness. If you retain Red Rocks, deal with the entire animal. Some folks tear off the claws and return the clawless crab to the depths.
We should show a bit more respect than that and process the entire crab, it’s not that hard.
What to do with all that crab? Crab is amazing on its own when it’s fresh, or maybe with a little bit of butter.
But we love to prepare it in a crab pot style meal as pictured above. We throw in some big fat hood canal shrimp, corn on the cob, and andouille sausage with copious amounts of old bay seasoning. Include some craft beer like an IPA (or two?) and you have all the makings of a food coma by crab pot!
I don’t know how often we will get out again just targeting crab, but I wouldn’t be against another trip out of Seabeck. In all likelihood, my next crabbing trip is potentially out of Kingston around the time Area 9 opens up for salmon during the short 4-day opener. Until next time, get out and experience that PNW Best Life crabbing and take the family too.