Feeling crabby about salmon fishing on the coast?
You should be, but not because of the fishing.
Yeah, yeah, I know salmon limits have been cut back; but the fact is, fishing has been decent.
Tillamook Bay, for example, is producing good catches of fall Chinook and coho; and (drum roll please) the weeds aren’t nearly as bad as last year.
But that’s not the point (more on salmon later)…In this case, I’m “clawing” at respect for bonus points.
…As in eight; one for the end of each yummy meat-filled leg on a Dungeness crab (10 on it’s red rock cousin)
Crabs have finished their annual molt and most – not all, certainly – are nearly moved in to their harder homes.
Reports up and down the Oregon Coast echo the beginning of the year’s best crabbing between now and late spring/early summer.
If you’re going fishing anyway, why not?
A cursory try with son Bill Monroe Jr. during a coho trip a Buoy 10, using six pots, yielded 52; most were well north of Oregon’s 5¾-inch minimum. (few use wire traps in the Columbia estuary, where strong tides, shifting sands and wire-crushing sea lions help keep sporting goods stores in business.)
Do your own math, but Jr. said they weigh a pound or more each (AI says 1.5-2). The fish lady at Fred Meyer said when they have whole Dungies (and they didn’t Tuesday), they’re either on sale for $10.99/lb. or regularly priced at 16.99/lb. Hmm…$88-$136 seems well worth the cost of fuel for a boat already committed to fishing; and the others I was with went home with limits of 12 each.
Only two of mine were soft-shelled. The rest were 75-90 percent filled.
Bill runs a mini-”Deadliest Catch” system, with a power winch and coiled weighted line on top of the pot as it’s tossed over the side.
Naturally, he saves salmon heads and carcasses for bait, but added a wild turkey backbone and neck from a recent hunt and that pot was a top producer.
You bird hunters might also be interested to know I’ve had good luck with pheasant and chukar parts in the past. They seemed to do better than duck remains.
Long gone are the days of using mink from Oregon fur farms, but venison bones work well if you’re a little sloppy with the boning knife (hint, hint).
The most fun I’ve had while crabbing was with my kids at anchor, casting folding traps baited with chicken legs. Sea lions may be the wolves of the estuary, but they chicken out on chicken, the legs of which fit perfectly on a folding trap skewer.
Curiously enough, the maker of a popular crab snare (loops attached to a small bait pot) chronicled his show-and-tell trip up the coast from Brookings recently on a relatively new Facebook page, “Coastal Crabbing and Shellfish”.
While he did spend some time casting and catching in established bays, he also found crabs casting directly into the Pacific (on calm days) from coastal headlands (think Yachats, among others).
The ocean is closed to sport crabbing from Oct. 16 through November, but not all winter days are stormy.
I was especially intrigued by barnacles hitchhiking on the carapace of one I brought home.
Turns out they’re not uncommon, even in an animal that sheds its shell annually.
Some male crabs grow old enough to stop molting, which allows one kind of barnacles to take hold.
Another barnacle is actually parasitic, drilling tentacles into the crab and, in some cases, even causing males to develop egg sacs while also stopping its molt.
Neither affects the flesh and this old-timer was hard-shelled and meat-filled when he took a hot bath.
Which is how I also felt in a warm shower after cleaning all those tasty critters.
Gordon King of Portland
Tillamook Bay: Hats off to those who’ve stuck it out over there!
The weed problem, while not completely resolved (will it ever be on a bay forested in eel grass?), has been remarkably better; perhaps as a result of some control over the indiscriminate and environmentally unsound practice by the oyster industry of intentionally clearing them.
And, lo and behold!
Gordon King of Portland, still fishing at a spry 97, fished with guide Lee Darby Monday and texted this welcome news:
“Three fishermen. Landed three Chinook. Eight Coho, all wild, and lost several others. Had doubles twice and a triple once. A day like none other. All in two and a half hours! My second largest salmon ever!!”
(They were in the Ghost Hole when his Chinook struck.)
FYI…hatchery coho are allowed in Tillamook, Nehalem and Nestucca bays and one wild daily (three/season) can be kept on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday through Oct. 26.