Victory!
On Friday, we FINALLY got out on the ocean, in a boat! And it worked!
We got up at a reasonable hour, loaded up the boat with all of our paraphernalia…a packed lunch, thermos of tea, crab traps, bait, lifejackets, fish finder, bucket, gaff, etc. Then we drove to the boat launch in Sidney. It wasn’t very busy, possibly because the weather was overcast and nippy  although the weather channel had predicted sunshine. (Of course, the weather channel has advised us that Thursday was supposed to be rainy, so we didn’t attempt to go out…and then it didn’t rain until nightfall. Typical.
Since this is a brand new motor, we had to run it at an idle for 5 minutes before leaving the dock, and then run very slowly for the next while. We slowly wandered down the coast, and eventually dropped our crab traps (once we found an area free of commercial traps, which were all over the place).
There were a LOT of cormorants on this old barge.
After we dropped the traps, we headed over to James Island for a look around the back side of it. There is an old munitions dock there, dating from the second world war. Looks like it might be a potential crabbing spot as there was eel grass. We passed another very large group of cormorants at James Island. I’ve never seen so many of them before.
After a couple of hours, we picked up our traps, and found we had a large (female) dungeness and several small ones in one trap. Those we returned to their rightful place. The second trap had collapsed, but there were two good–sized (legal!) red rock crabs on top of it. We put them in our bucket and returned to the boat launch.
All in all- a successful day on the water.