CRAB!

Thursday, July 16. Day 12.

Woke to clouds and the possibility of rain showers. We had a very peaceful night, there wasn't a breath of wind all night. We had a very lazy morning just chatting about the past couple of days and what we were going to do today. Finally, at around 1200 we went to check the shrimp pots we set over in Bessborough Bay yesterday. Once again one pot had floated. The pot that had floated only had 2 prawns in it. Not worth the effort to pull it up. The other pot did not drift but once again there were only 13 prawns in it. Of course once again they were all very, very large Spot prawns, but not what we wanted. We were used to pulling up prawn catches of 50-100 prawns, not 13. We reset the prawn traps trying to make sure we put them in a place were they would not drift and where the bottom looked like it would be "prawny."

Once again, we had no crabs from our traps that we set in Bessborough Bay. Was it our bait, or was Bessborough Bay fished out of crab? So we decided to motor over to Topaz Harbor. Topaz Harbor is a very large bay that is very shallow and has lots of streams pouring into it. This should be good crab country. We initially set the crab pots in the outer reaches of Jackson Bay but pulled up nothing. We sat and chatted and wondered about the logging camp on shore. The logging camp consisted of a 100' freighter that was beached on shore. The generator ran continously and belched black smoke. There were quite a few crab pots farther in Jackson Bay so we tried there. While we waited we enjoyed drifting along and looking at the bottom - we saw lots of fish, but no crabs. We then decided to let them soak longer and went to explore the head of Topaz Harbor. For 19 years I had motored right by Topaz Harbor but never ever ventured in. As we motored farther in to Topaz Harbor we noticed commercial crab pots everywhere. Finally we came to the crabber just finishing cleaning up after setting all his pots. We chatted with him and he gave us a few very smelly fish carcasses for use in our crab pots. We motored back to our crab pots in Jackson Bay and set them with the carcasses that we were given. We then motored back to the Independence. As we cruised back to the Independence, our desire for crab grew so great that we decided to ask the crabber if we could purchase some crab from him as he passed our anchorage.

I grabbed my wallet and a couple of cold beers and motored out to the crabber as he motored down Wellbore Channel. He sold me 5 large Dungeness crab - all 9" across the back of the shell - for $20 Canadian. He appreciated the cold beers too. I returned back to the Independence with fresh crab! We were finally going to have fresh crab for dinner.

Today was a day of successes. While we were over in Topaz Harbor and Jackson Bay I left the generator running to keep the batteries charging and the refrigerator cold. That morning the generator started up fine. All I did was add 1/2 pint of oil to the generator motor. Maybe that's all it took?

We enjoyed a nice crab dinner, cold Cesar drinks and a beautiful calm evening.