The waterfront of Mukilteo is as good a place as any to test if there is any truth to the aphorism, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. From its bucolic origin as the shortest paddle for the local tribes to reach Whidbey Island, things headed south with lumber mills through the 1930's, a federal ammunition, bomb and nitroglycerin dump through WWII, and finally an ammo/fuel depot through the 1980s. Which is exactly the kind of resume you like to see for an ideal crabbing location...
Today the waterfront has developed a feeling of "post industrial chic" with only tank foundations and partial containment walls left standing while Boeing operates a dock for loading/unloading plane fuselages from extra wide rail cars that run on their own two miles of track up into the Paine Field factory. The old piers are now a favorite haunt of the local divers for the variety of sea life and the fun of chasing down your crab leg dinner. In fact, watching their youtube videos is an excellent Friday afternoon activity and spurred this attempt to see if heavy metal contamination makes a positive or negative contribution to the terroir of the local crustaceans.
Step 1: Load stinky bits of last year's blog posts into crab pots. This outing's winning formula was coho salmon carcass and lots of razor clam guts.
Step 2: Paddle little red boat under the Boeing dock without bumping the heads of any surfacing divers or seals.
Step 3: Deploy crab gear and twiddle thumbs in the sun. Do not get over eager, checking the ring pot every 15 minutes only gets you an upper body workout.
Step 4: Pull up a bunch of toe pinchers and set them on top of your bare feet (optional). You could also plan ahead and bring kevlar footwear.
Step 5: Take excessive number of photos while keeper crabs escape...
Repeat Steps 1-4 until cooler is full of dungeness and red rock crabs. The morning's haul was four keeper dungeness (exactly 4x better than any of my previous attempts) and three red rocks which roughly works out to one crab boil for two and three pounds of crab dip which is still hanging out on my hips...