This weekend was an adventurous one for sure, especially in my mundane world. Several months ago I was out with some friends, talking about plans for the rest of the year, and a guy mentions “Hey I go on a crabbing trip in November if anybody is interested.” I said yeah, I was, but didn’t follow up on it too well in my usual manner. So early last week the same guy says “Well, the crab trip is this weekend, are you in?” What the heck, yes I am. I quickly threw together what I hoped might be enough gear to get me through a three-night camp, and we took off Thursday morning for Bodega Bay. There was just four of us Thursday night, so we set up camp and got all the crab pots ready. That included setting up the ropes and buoys, cutting up disgusting bait for them, and loading them in the boat. I participated as little as possible, especially in the bait cutting. Nasty stuff there. There was only room for two guys on the boat with all the traps, so me and the other guy who’d never been stayed back while the other two made a run out and dropped them all.
Friday morning, we got up not-particularly-early and headed out to check the traps. I will readily admit some trepidation at the size of the small-ish boat, which we were taking out over a mile off shore. That’s a big ol’ ocean out there, and the water was rough. I loaded up on Dramamine and those sea-sickness wristbands and hoped for the best. My hopes were quickly dashed when we got out to the trap area. We couldn’t see any shoreline, just big 10 foot swells going every which way. All of a sudden the other newbie was chumming a little extra crab bait over the side, and I was pouring sweat and turning 3 shades of green. Not fun. I never got sick but I probably would have been better off if I had. We stuck it out though, and pulled in our limit of crabs. Then the guy driving the boat says, “Hey, you guys mind if we head out a few more miles and do a little fishing for a while?” Ohhhhhh nooooo. I was sort of the odd man out on the trip, so I said, “Hey, yeah whatever, do your thing.” My face must have said something else entirely, because he busted out laughing and said “Just jacking with you, we’ll head back.” Picking on the new guys, real cool.
The entire rest of the weekend was spent repeating this process. A lot more guys showed up thankfully, so I was spared more boat trips. Every trip at least one guy would come back and head straight for his tent though. I actually felt lucky that I recovered after the ride, some guys were out of commission for entire afternoons. As for myself, I stuck to the crap prep and cooking teams, which was a blast. Over the weekend we hauled in nearly 200 crabs and cooked them all up. The veterans of the trip had been doing this for almost 20 years I guess, so they had a definite system down. We ate crab every meal in some fashion, and still had more than plenty to divvy up and take home. Good times!
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- Cuttin’ some bait for the pots on Thursday night. A quite disgusting mixture of mackerel and squid.
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- night-cooking some carne asada Thursday night, as we hadn’t caught any crabs yet. Note that, after 20 years of doing this trip, nobody thought to bring any cooking utensils. Luckily we found a plastic fork. Shades of my Easter float trip for sure.
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- My home for the next three nights.
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- Headed out of the bay
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- Bringing in the crab pots. Those suckers were heavy, and 130 feet deep. I helped a lot, I just, uh, had to stop for a picture.
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- Success!
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- Back at camp with our haul
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- I may not have been much help in the boat, but at least I thought to bring a coffee pot. This helped my status immensely, I’m sure.
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- Cracking up some legs for crab cakes.
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- The holding well on the boat, full of crabs.
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- Transferring them from the boat for their untimely demise
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- The crab cakes were delicious
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- Working the cakes. (Still with the plastic forks.)
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- Whenever we cleaned the crabs, you could count on a good group of campers coming over to check it out. The guys would go all Tom-Sawyer on them: “Yeah, here’s how you do it, want to try?” Worked like a champ.
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- Two 150 quart coolers full of crab legs. The one on the left just came off the boil, still steaming.
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- Stopped by Lagunitas on the way home of course, always fun.
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- Working the breakfast hash Sunday morning. Somebody showed up with a spatula Saturday night, we were living large.
Float trip West Coast version for sure, right down to the same burn barrel!
Somebody even drug a big log out of the tree line and laid it across the fire ring. Some things are just the same in any state.
Wow looks like you had an awesome time. They should have put you in charge of the cooking. I’m sure you would have remembered utensils. LOL
No doubt. I’m looking forward to next year, I’ll be more prepared. The motion sickness patches that everybody else had are high on the list, along with a spatula.