Carry On Crabbing

Continuing our attempts to get our boat into the water and catch crabs, we arose early on Saturday morning, loaded the boat onto the truck and headed off for Island View beach. For once, everything came together for us.  The water was slightly choppy, but not too bad, there was lots of space in the parking lot and the boat ramp was clear. Huzzah!

We backed down the ramp, hauled the boat off, loaded it up with the crab pots, bait, bucket, safety equipment, anchor, gas tank, and other sundry items and put on our life vests. We carried the motor over to the boat and attached it. Then we put on rubber boots, and Steve went and parked the truck while I babysat the boat.

On his return, we dragged the boat into the water, flipped the wheels up and locked them into place, hopped in and began our watery adventure…or not. Since I was sitting in the bow, it fell to me to man the oars. That’s something I haven’t done for a very long time. I went dragon-boating with my company once, a couple of years ago, but that was only one oar among many. Prior to that, I hadn’t paddled since I was about 20…a very long time ago. It took me a few minutes to get coordinated, but I finally pulled away from the beach, and Steve pulled on the cord to start the motor. It sputtered to life, I stopped rowing…and the motor stopped. I promptly started rowing again, keeping us out from the beach that the tide was determined to toss us upon.

Thirty minutes later, I was still rowing, and the motor had briefly flickered to life a couple of times, and died as quickly. At that point, we accepted the fact that the fates were against us, and headed back to shore, loaded up the boat and went home.

We still wanted some crabs, so we grabbed the purse nets and drove to the nearest pier. There were about 15 people there, along with a couple of scuba divers with a huge chest who were planning on scooping up all the crab they could lay their hands on, so we headed to the pier in Sidney.  We tossed out our nets, and after about an hour and a half, we came away with one crab (it would have been two if the big fellow clinging to the outside of the net hadn’t fallen off at the lat minute). It started to rain at that point, or we might have stuck around hoping for another.

Since we only had one crab, we made crab macaroni and cheese. It was very delicious.