Hood Canal Crabbing and Flounder October 2020

Hood Canal offers some of the most scenic crabbing and fishing in the entire Pacific Northwest. We share all about our successful trip for Dungeness crab and flounder on scenic Hood Canal in October 2020

You can also check out our page on the Puget Sound Crab Season 2020 for more ideas of where to crab in Puget Sound during the winter.

Also, checkout our comprehensive page on Puget Sound Crabbing here.

When it comes to preparing for a Dungeness crabbing trip on Puget Sound, or anywhere for that matter, one always needs to consider what their crab bait strategy is. Yes, you can always crab with some chicken thighs or drumsticks and soak them in a commercial shellfish scent.

However, I love to make use of the byproducts from other PNW harvest opportunities to produce top quality crab bait. Salmon carcass and razor clam trimmings are some of the best bait “byproduct” baits you can get your hands on.

My all-time favorite bait, however, is the carcass from an albacore tuna. If you’ve ever handled albacore tuna, the level of oiliness is off the charts. It’s like handling soft butter. The carcass with the bits of oily meat attached makes excellent crab bait. Probably my absolute favorite crab bait.

We had great success earlier in October crabbing Hood Canal with salmon, clams, and chicken, but this time we wanted to try out the tuna carcasses to see how many Hood Canal crab we could put in the cooler. There’s nothing like fresh Dungeness crab, eaten that very day they were caught!

A lot of people have reported slim picking for Dungeness crab in Hood Canal. Here’s the secret that you need to know to have success: You need to crab in 100+ feet of water.

We’ve broken out the 400′ shrimp lines to enable us to target 100-300 feet of water combined with longer soaks to get good limits of Dungeness crab out of Hood Canal.

It’s best when you can combine multiple 100′ crab lines with the modular C-link system from SMI. I’m definitely going in that direction with my crab gear, as even during the summer, some of the shallow areas will get crabbed out, and going deeper can absolutely produce.

Later in the winter crabbing season, the shallows will become favored again, but that period between October-November is often a deep soak crabbing game in hood canal or wherever.

We dropped our crab pots in 120-160 ft of hood canal water and then started work on one of our favorite aspects of these trips:

Making hot beverages with our Jetboil.

After everyone had a hot drink in hand, we set out to get to the legal hood canal flounder fishing areas.

It’s always fun to have a fishing diversion while crabbing Hood Canal as our pots fill with tasty Dungeness crab.

We like to use light tackle trout rods with light 1/2 oz to 1 oz mooching sinkers with 18-24″ leaders. We bait our hooks with squid strips about the size of a fingernail.

You have to pay attention to where you are fishing for Flounder in Hood Canal / Marine Area 12. Hood Canal is only open for Flounder north of a true east-west line at the mouth of Turner Creek.

We focus on 70-120′ of water in areas of reduced current flow. Drop the bait all the way to the bottom, come up slightly, and then gradually raise and drop the bait as the boat drifts across productive flounder fishing areas.

One of my favorite aspects of taking people out on my boat is introducing kids to their first fish or crabbing experience. Of course, they always remember that cup of hot chocolate we made for them with the Jetboil too!

After about 3-4 hours of pot soaking time, we decided to head back to our crab pots. We were quite happy with our results, pulling several limits of crab over our 3 deep soaking pots.

While there are other places further north where a great day of crabbing is perhaps double what we pulled, this is a great outcome for Hood Canal during a 3-4 hour soak time with 3 pots.