A couple crabs

TyBoo

TyBoo

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Staff member
The first pot up had 26 legal crab.. Problem is, the limit for the two of us is 24. We tossed back at least 50 keepers and kept 24 that were all bigger than the gauge.

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I'd offer a trade for some Lake Trout from Isle Royale, but I think I only have two left. I need to get out west during the crabbing season! Colby
 
Wow, Mike, Nice catch. I'm surprised nobody asked what you were using for bait :roll: Me, I don't care :shock: I don't crab, but sure looks like you hit a honey hole.

Harvey
SleepyC :moon

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Bait was a salmon carcass and a couple chicken thighs that was used one time previously and refrozen in the bait bags. The only addition for today was one whole jumbo razor clam in each bag.
 
WOW! Good job. You really have to work in Grays Harbor or Willapa Bay to get your limit of 6 crabs. All the crabs must be down at the Columbia this year. The commercial crabbers up north really hit the crabs hard during the summer off Westport and Tokland. Not much left up here before the state lets them hammer the crabs again.
 
That's incredible. The local grocers around here charge $15 a pound for a whole crab. So, you caught 24 crabs, assume 2.5 pounds per crab at $15 per pound; You caught $900 worth of crabs in one day! That almost makes buying a boat seem like a reasonable thing to do!
 
They are a lot cheaper here. I have never bought any but I often look at the price of the Costco 2-pack. It is usually around $25 so I always figure the crab are worth about twelve and a half bucks each.

On a good note, the pot puller cost was down to 71¢ per crab kept at the end of last season. The crab we caught before the electric puller were a whole lot more costly if labor is figured in.

The neat thing about the dungeness fishery, as I understand it, is that the legal size males no longer contribute to sustaining the population so overharvesting is of little worry. Just like with the humans, the young males get most of the action so the old guys are pretty much just wasting food. Catching the legal size ones actually benefits the rest of them. I think the limits are set to ensure that everyone who wants gets a crack at 'em (good pun huh?).
 
TyBoo":tmfeg9n5 said:
They are a lot cheaper here. I have never bought any but I often look at the price of the Costco 2-pack. It is usually around $25 so I always figure the crab are worth about twelve and a half bucks each.


The neat thing about the dungeness fishery, as I understand it, is that the legal size males no longer contribute to sustaining the population so overharvesting is of little worry. Just like with the humans, the young males get most of the action so the old guys are pretty much just wasting food. Catching the legal size ones actually benefits the rest of them. I think the limits are set to ensure that everyone who wants gets a crack at 'em (good pun huh?).
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That's kind of how it works, here in the Puget Sound. Here, a male crab becomes sexually active at 2 years of age and becomes legally catchable at four years of age. So a legal male crab has had two years to contribute to making new crabs. A male crab can still help make plenty of new crabs after that age but, right now, two years is enough to have a sustainable harvest and to maximize that harvest for humans. Also, up here, under this plan, we harvest about 95% percent of all available legal males between the recreational harvesters, the tribes and other commercial crabbers.

This is also why it's so important to NOT keep undersized males, no matter how tempting. You cut off half of its reproductive potential by keeping a male that is just shy of being legal.
 
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