I finally got the boat back out on the water to try and get some crab on the last day of the season in Marine area 8-2 near Everett, WA.
Usually, this season remains open through December, but unfortunately this year WDFW announced the closure on Oct 24th. Why did it close early and how did we do?
There were a lot of crab in 8-1 and 8-2, so much so that the commercial catch rate exploded in what they refer to as Area 2 East (same as the recreational 8-1/8-2).
Notice the -140,100 number. That indicates that the commercial non-tribal fisherman harvested 140k pounds above their share! Another interesting observation on these numbers is that all the serious crabbing takes place in the San Juans (Region 1) and Marine Areas 8-1 and 8-2 (Region 2 East).
I know a lot of the summer crabbing was tough in some of the areas like 9 and 10, and you can see that the commercials are largely avoiding those or don’t have a season open there.
We’ve done several of these trips out of Everett and had pretty good success. On crabbing trips it’s important to have a strategy.
I like to vary the depth on the first pots I’m dropping. Crab move around and in different conditions could be at different depths. Last year, we got the crab in 150+ feet of water.
This year, with the rivers being blown out and just coming down from flood stage, I was thinking these crab would be a little shallower. We had so many pinks return to spawn in the rivers this year and many of those fish carcasses would be flushed downstream with the huge rains. Crab will be sitting on the underwater slopes near the river mouths waiting for these fish to wash out.
We laid our 6 traps in a string spanning a half mile from south to north at varying depths. We started checking them after only 50 minutes, as we wanted to have an early indication of how things were fishing.
We started getting keepers in about 65-75 ft of water. Nothing in the 100 ft+ range this year, and mostly just shorts and females in the water 50 ft and shallower.
We had our best pot pulls in the same general area, which I would describe as the bar directly downstream of one of the primary channels of the Snohomish River as it dumps into Possession Sound. We were crabbing an incoming tide all morning, which was nice because it canceled out the strong flow of freshwater to create a neutral current most of the morning.
We used a variety of bait from salmon carcasses, a ling carcass, hot dogs, and chicken soaked in crabbing oil. All of it worked. As we triangulated where we were getting the big male dungies, we moved our other pots into this area to improve our catch rate.
For more on crab seasons and some tips and techniques you can checkout this earlier article on 2019 crab seasons.
