This Memorial Day weekend marked the first attempt to forsake home court advantage and introduce the little man to the Harbor. As all first time fathers probably do, I made sure to pack all of the essentials and then some: crab pot (✔), surf perch/jetty rods (✔), crab hawk rod (✔), various clam parts for bait (✔), smores supplies (✔), baby stuff (✔?).
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For a starting course we headed to the Westport marina to try some crab hawking. A crab hawk is just two mesh panels that are spring loaded to open and lay flat on the bottom while crabs fight over their choice of horse and razor clam necks from previous adventures. Once you get tired of twiddling your thumbs, pull up and the panels close around dinner. Or at least that is the plan. As all of my best plans go, this one was a bust. Plenty of crabs in the sea but the outer wall of the marina had been picked over for anything remotely close to legal.
Plenty of catch and release practice but my guiding points balance is trending rapidly towards default... Good thing I bring only the most enthusiastic friends.
I'm ashamed to have no pictures but we almost saw a trawler tip and crash into a wall of the marina. We were all too shocked to get a video rolling (I'm working on that reflex) and luckily the trawler stabilized. The captain was remarkably calm when he came on the comm to tell his crew something to the effect "those arms need to be set or we are going down". I imagine he turned around and really started cursing when he realized his mai-tai had spilled.
The last hope was the trusty ring pot deposited in the marina proper. Predictably it was full of red rock crabs that wouldn't be a legal width if you backed over them in the parking lot.
The next morning we hit the beach for some surf perch. There was no room in the apparently too small Subaru for chest waders so it was a day of hoping to hop over the next wave (100% effective, you need not fear waves splashing up underneath your coat). I also had thought some dungeness crab might be in the shallows for scooping as I have seen at the northern beaches but not a single crab in reach. I think that actually worked in our advantage as they were not there to steal all of our bait.
Which is how we managed to catch a single redfin surf perch in the act of eating a razor clam neck. Fried whole in the pan he was pretty tasty, highly recommend that approach over putting your filleting skills to the test.
The final act of the trip was a solo attempt for crabbing redemption. I tried jumping ahead of the marina crowd by climbing onto one of the finger jetties just downstream. The downside is wave exposure but what is that compared to actually getting into keeper crabs!
Finished with three dungeness keepers for the pot. It might have been a full pot but I had the wrong legal size for red rock crab in my head, 5.75" when its actually 5". That's basically only keeping the Manute Bol red rocks when I could have been keeping everything bigger than a Spud Webb. Feeling my age with that reference...
