Saturday Morning Crabbin'

Kandi and I gave the South Sound a try for crabbing. Got up at 5 a.m. and headed to Zittles marina. Surprisingly, the ramp wasn't too busy. The new ramp fee also caught us by surprise. We only brought 10 bucks which was the usual rate. Kandi had to go ask for money from folks around the ramp.

It was a beautiful morning on the Sound. We could see Mt. Rainier and the Olympics really well. We headed towards the Nisqually reach and dropped our pot at around 50 ft of water. It was slack tide and the crabbing was good. The shad were working great. Then it slowed down once the tide started to move back in.

We almost lost a pot from the debris from seaweeds and kelp. It held the line down from one of our pots and submerged our buoy. Luckily, it popped back up after a few mintues of searching. I'm glad we didn't give up, otherwise it would have been a costly lost.

More Shad FIshing

I decided to make a solo mission banzai run to Bonneville to try and get more shad. I left my house at 3 a.m. in the morning and drove non-stop to North Bonneville. Fishing started strong in the morning. By mid-morning, it was scratch fishing. The big females finally showed up and they are a blast to catch. Bigger than the males and they fight much harder. I took home about 15 fish.

Where's the highway?

Boy, this colder than normal temps and high flows from the Columbia River must be really throwing the coming of warmer water off the coast....it's no where in sight. Well, it is but down in Mexico!

I don't know if I'll be able to hunt during the July 4th weekend. I might have to look at other options. In the meantime, Matt and I got our Canadian licenses yesterday. We left Olympia at about 4:40 and got to the Campbell River Store in Surrey right around 7 a.m. when the store was just opening. Traffic was fairly light, but it still took us roughly 45 minutes to get back in the states.

Shad Weekend

Despite the horrible shad counts and weekend weather report, we went down to Stevenson and Bonneville Dam anyway. We took off after work and sure enough as we got down to the Camas area it starts raining. It was dark and driving up to the windy Hwy 14 was a little hairy. But we made it. Got to our cabin and saw that Matt and Maria were already there.

Woke up the next morning to find more rain and wind. Nevertheless we braved it and went to the dam. We got to the spot and saw that there were people fishing. We did find that there were some fish around. Saw a huge sturgeon rolling around no doubt looking for breakfast burrito shad. We fished for about 8 hours on Sat and ended up keeping about 2 dozen. We lost more than what we kept.


Sunday was great weather wise. The sun was shining and little wind. Fishing however was not great. We fished till noon and only kept 7 fish and probably lost another 7. They just weren't there in force yet. The counts will probably now jump to the solid numbers that we typically in June.

More Halibut

More Westport Halibut action.This time I opted to splash the boat the night before. The tides were suppose to be out at 5 a.m. Turns out there was enough water to launch. Either way, it's a good learning experience. I found the cuddy cabin very comfortable to sleep in.

We almost didn't make this trip. Saturday morning, I went to check on the boat and heard the bilge pump on. Since I had just sealed the deck plate, I had to think of another way to get to the pump. First, I had to cut the power off to stop the pump before it drained my battery. I disconnected the wires from the battery until I found the wire that stopped the pump.

Now, I had to open the bracket hatch. I unscrewed the hatch and carefully pried it open. I looked at the sensor and found that the plastic was eaten through...like it short circuited and cooked itself. No good. So I called Puget Marina and told Charlie I'm on my way. I hooked up the truck and raced to the shop. Charlie was great and was ready for action. He replaced the pump with a float switch and wired it all back up and sealed the hatch. Great. I can go fishing.

Anyway, we had great conditions for a run offshore. The forecast was for 10 to 15 knot winds with 1-2 foot wind waves and 3 foot swells. We left the dock at around 5:15 with another boat following us. The Bloodydeck pack is right behind us. The tide was at low slack. Even then the bar was a bit bumpy, but the boat had no problem picking through the bumps. Once away from the bar, it flattened out and we kept a 20 mph pace all the way to the fishing grounds.

Once at the fishing grounds we found another productive spot and got our limits in no time. I did learn that I need to rethink my equipment for deep drops. It's going to be a must to have electric reels to drop to 700 ft of water. I'm also going to get 30 wide Arubas next year for the extra line capacity.