Hood Canal Crabbing January 2020

I’ve wanted to get this post up about our Hood Canal Crabbing trip quickly since winter crabbing is closing at the end of this week, but I’ve been waylaid by a virus (probably corona?) that knocked me out the last 3-4 days.

We were only on the water for about 4-5 hours but experienced decent success with keeper crabs. Most of them were Red Rock, but we still got some nice big Dungeness crab sprinkled in the mix.

Winter Dungeness crab are usually packed with so much meat that a single 7.5″ crab can be quite the meal. I know some people turn their nose up at the Red Rock’s, but we don’t. The taste is fantastic, even it if it takes a bit more work. I would rather prune the population anyways since they compete with the Dungeness.

We launched from the Seabeck area and got started shortly after sunrise. We took some time to take pictures of the majestic Olympics covered in snow staring at us to the west.

Whenever you are looking for a new place to crab, you must always consider sources of fresh water. Especially after a good set of storms flushes a lot of fresh water down the system.

That water will carry with it biomass that crab will come up out of the deep to feed on. You want a nice gradual slope from the creek/river mouth to the deeper water that gives them easy access. You may need to set a few pots at different depths to figure out where they are at.

I’ve collected a variety of traps/pots these days with different rope lengths and ways to configure them. We fished from 40 ft to 150 ft and got crab in all of those pots.

Our best spot was about 60 ft of water just NE of Little Beef Harbor, we picked up multiple Dungeness keepers in that ring trap.

The bigger pots had orange bait canisters loaded with this mackerel, cat food, and crab fuel sauce for broadcast dispersion along with salmon backbones or whole fillets of less-than-smoker-quality salmon from last season.

A side note on that: Sometimes, you keep that fish that is a bit of a gamble. Sometimes it cuts nice and red and other times it’s booted up white mush. Well, the boot is not good enough for my smoker, but it’s good enough for my crab pots!

I’ve found that the booted up whole fillets are far more enticing to crab than a backbone with higher quality meat on it.

I always have one pot with rope that can reach 200 ft + because there’s been times when all the shallow stuff strikes out, but huge success came from targeting 150-200 ft.

One of my favorite surprises I like to hit new people on my boat with is asking them which warm beverage they would like. I’ve been loving my JetBoil Sumo I bought over a year back and it usually goes with me on trips like this.

It can boil a lot of water quite fast. You can easily buy the instant coffee, mocha, hot chocolate or whatever to add to your boiled hot water and make a warm treat that both kids and adults greatly enjoy.

Just a reminder that we are an Amazon Affiliate, so you are supporting our site by using the above link to purchase the JetBoil (no price diff). Thank you!

After about 4 hours on the water and way more crab than my friends were going to consume in a single meal, we headed back to the launch.

I also talked them through buying a vacuum sealer and the ultimate vacuum sealer crab hack I learned from my good friend Ash. You wrap the crab in paper towels so their pointy bits don’t break the vacuum seal bags!

Get some crab in your freezer (and your belly!) before the season is over and you have to wait until July! Also, enjoy our short YouTube video in this article, please like and subscribe.