2019 Crabing Bodega Bay Ca.

[Broke Boater]

Fall is definitely our favorite time of year. Pheasant season is open at our club and getting out following our Vizsla in the field as she does what she was bred for never gets old. This past weekend end Dungeness Crag season for sport fisherman opened and we made our annual trek to Bodega Bay with a good group of friends. I had the Camper loaded and the boat all hooked up waiting for Lisa to get home from work Friday, the small downside of a younger wife that still works lol. We got our crab and have been eating it for three days now, it doesn't freeze well so its all about sharing with the village and binge eating for a few days. We got a few 3lbers and many 2lbers this year, your allowed 10 per day, they average 1lb in the beginning of the season. As the season goes on and after the commercials get after them in a couple weeks they get mopped pretty quick and smaller legal size get kept. Fresh crab, some fresh sourdough bread, and good wine, great friends, what's not to love about fall,,,gregg

 

[Tom]

Thanks for sharing Gregg. Just curious, do you set the pots out with marker buoys and come back later to harvest what's in them?

 

[Broke Boater]

Yep, drop'em and make a waypoint on the boats GPS, let them soak for 4-5 hour. Come back and pull them for that days limit,  rebait, drop'em, soak over night and pull the next morning to replace what you ate the night before. Sometimes you miss the biomass and have to relocate to find them. I use my sonar and charts to look for mud to soft sandy bottom, rocky bottom for Dungies is no Bueno,,,gregg 

 

[SeilerBird]

Watch out for the birds ;D

 

[Tom]

When we head out the Golden Gate and turn south, a big issue can be the countless small (almost invisible) buoys and lines down to commercial crab pots. I've talked with a couple of commercial crabbers, and they say to stay out beyond 300 feet depth, because they can't/don't put pots down deeper than that.

 

[SeilerBird]

I used to do a lot of scuba diving for lobsters. When diving we would come across traps with nice sized lobsters in it and it would be simple to open the trap and steal the lobster. However rumor was that Fish and Game put out lobster traps with black light paint on it that could not be seen underwater and if you did steal a lobster you would glow when under a black light. And it could not be washed off very easily. I saw many F&G officers but I never saw one wielding a black light.