WDFW has announced the exact details for the opening of the 2020 Winter Puget Sound crab season. There won’t be as many folks on the water and the crab will be larger with more meat on them.
Time to get more tasty Dungeness crab!
Now the very productive Marine Area 8-1 and 8-2 are open. In the past, we’ve spent our winter crabbing trips on 8-2 off of Mission Bar.
Hood Canal / Marine Area 12 was open for last winter crabbing season and we had to take advantage of the closer crabbing opportunity.
We’ve built a longer form page devoted to crabbing the Puget Sound here.
We tend to do better crabbing the Puget Sound in the winter vs the summer. Here are a few links to our past trips.
Crabbing Hood Canal in January 2020
Crabbing Puget Sound in October 2019
Winter Crabbing and going deeper
Best ways to catch Dungeness crab
Focus on the preferred habitat of Dungeness crabs which is 40-80 ft depth off of sandy beaches with gradual slopes. You can catch crab much shallower or much deeper, but these are the primary productive depths.
When it comes to looking for where to crab, you could focus on where all the other red/white buoys are being placed as a starting point! You can also look for the gradually sloping sandy flats near freshwater sources.
You can find these spots pretty easily using an app like Navionics.
Best bait to use for crabbing
There are many baits which work great for crabbing. Because we fish for salmon a lot, we end up using the carcasses quite a bit.
Razor clams and/or the trimmings also work really really well for crab bait. This is what the commercials use. Some areas have a lot of seals and they can jack up your rings/traps if you use salmon, so we will use plain old chicken drumsticks soaked in crab fuel.
The best pot soak I’ve ever achieved was probably with a tuna carcass/trimmings though. That’s just unreal.
I will also use my shrimp bait formula as a way to draw crab into the pot as well and then have something (like a carcass) for the crab to work at (in a bait armor of course).
Check out out fast a pot fills up with crab after it’s dropped with good bait!
There are a lot of baits that work for crab, but don’t skimp, especially if you are crabbing around a lot of other pots!
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