Dungeness Season is Slow

Since the Season opened last November, pickings at Pacifica Pier have tended to be rather thin on the ground. A couple of Dungeness is all most people expect. I was out last week, and I caught 2, and when I got them home and cooked them, there was not that much meat inside them; and what was in the shell was fairly dehydrated looking, as if the crabs had been living on fumes over the past week.

Still, the weather was great, and its always nice to meet interesting new people.

Overall, using hook and line seems to be generally more successful at Pacifica than using traps, because generally the sealions make life difficult as they systematically pry open one trap after another. The seafloor doesnt seem to make life easier either; mostly the bait comes up covered with sand, as if the bottom foot or so is a continual cloud of sand, which cant make it easier for the crabs to find the bait. Last week however, I noticed others were having some luck, and the sealions werent around, so I put down a trap and almost immediately pulled up a keeper. If I had known how thin the meat was, I'd probably have thrown it back, but still it indicated that when the weather is calm, traps do seem to have better luck than when its choppy.

The word on the street is that either an incoming tide or an outgoing tide is fine, either side of high tide slack water; but it seemed that all afternoon, after high tide was past, the fishing was lousy, despite a decent morning. Time to head to the chinese market for my crab dinner methinks.