{"id":5000,"date":"2018-01-11T15:20:01","date_gmt":"2018-01-11T23:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/?p=5000"},"modified":"2019-09-07T07:28:59","modified_gmt":"2019-09-07T14:28:59","slug":"sailing-crabbing-in-moss-landing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/sailing-crabbing-in-moss-landing\/","title":{"rendered":"Sailing: Crabbing in Moss Landing"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Lexi and I have a Pearson 30\u2019 Sailboat from the 1970s that we bought about a year ago. We are still new sailors, and I\u2019ve been overly excited to learn to sail, and enjoying every second of it. But I\u2019ve also been excited to do some fishing from the boat; in particular, crabbing!<\/p>\n

I got a round \u201ccommercial style\u201d crab trap a month or so ago, and I had been trying to figure out where to put it to actually catch some crabs. You can pick them up from West Marine, eBay or Amazon for about $120-$150, depending on the size, quality and number of entrances. This\u00a0Promar Stainless Steel Mesh Crab Pot Rubber Wrap Rebar<\/a> looks like a good one for a descent price. I heard the round ones are better at retaining crabs; the square folding traps are cheaper and have flimsy doors that can sometimes let crabs escape. They also rust a lot faster, and will only last a few seasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lexi and I dropped our new crab trap in about 80\u2019 of water just northbound from the Moss Landing harbor. We picked it up the next day, and didn\u2019t get anything. In fact, we lost the \u201cbait cup\u201d that was in it, as I didn\u2019t attach it to anything and it seemed to have magically floated out one of the holes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

About a week later I went out with my friend Scott and a few of his companions on his daughter\u2019s birthday. I dropped the trap again in a similar location at about 80′, but I tied the bait buckets down tight to make sure they wouldn\u2019t disappear. My plan was to pick it up about an hour later and see if it got anything. Unfortunately, I couldn\u2019t find the trap! The seas were calm and I could easily see around, but but my GPS waypoint must have been incorrect. We looked for quite a while, and finally called it lost or stolen. Sometimes whales will accidentally move them around or get tangled in the lines. Or, more likely, someone else will see the float on the surface and claim the trap for themselves.<\/p>\n

I still wanted to catch some crabs, but I decided that another $120 trap would not be worth it at this time. So, I purchased a\u00a0KUFA Vinyl coated Crab Trap (24″x24″x12″H) S60<\/a>\u00a0for $25, and rigged it with some of the extra line I had left over. We decided to go for deeper water, and headed to the top of the canyon that sits in front of Moss Landing, about 3 nautical miles due west from the harbor. I instantly knew we were in a better spot, as we saw a bunch of other crab floats in the area. We dropped the trap in about 180\u2019 of water, and sailed around for about 20 minutes before attempting to re-locate the trap. I didn\u2019t want to loose it! \u00a0We pulled it up and it already had two small Dungeness crabs! We should have measured them, but figured they were too small, and tossed them back in the water and put the trap back down. The plan was to leave it overnight, so we started heading back to the harbor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While we were heading back I kept scanning the horizon. I spotted something in the distance that looked like a crab trap float; but it wasn\u2019t in the \u201csweet\u201d spot we just discovered, and looked familiar. So, we headed over to it, and to my surprise it was my <\/strong>crab trap float! It had been about 12 days since I lost the pot, and we quickly pulled it up. Inside it had three humungous crabs.<\/p>\n

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\"IMG<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"IMG<\/p>\n

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We did some googling, and weren\u2019t sure if the crabs were edible, so we tossed them back \u00a0in the water. Later, we learned they are a type of Spider Crab called Sheep Crab; related to the decorator crab. They are editable, but not really worth the effort. We didn\u2019t set the freshly rescued round commercial trap out, and just brought it back to shore.<\/p>\n

The next morning I went out with my friend Tim and pulled up the square trap. It had a small red crab that we tossed back in the water, so I re-baited it and put the trap back in the water. We also set the round trap. \u00a0Tim and I cruised around for about an hour, playing with the gennaker for the first time.<\/p>\n

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\"IMG<\/p>\n

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We came back to the traps and pulled them up; the square trap had three legal size Dungeness, and the round trap had a legal red crab. I was excited beyond belief! Tim took home one of the crabs, and I took the three others. Lexi and I feasted on crab for dinner. It was the first time that I had ever had a red crab, and it was really delicious; I liked it more than the Dungeness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0One of the\u00a0Dungeness:<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

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And the red crab; they have HUGE claws, but a smaller carapace:<\/p>\n

\"IMG<\/p>\n

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Since then, we have caught three more (24 hour soak), and gotten skunked one time (30 minute soak).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some ramblings about where to go crabbing off Moss Landing in a sailboat, and the equipment I use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[162,71,70,160],"class_list":["post-5000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sailing","tag-crabbing","tag-fishing","tag-sailboat","tag-sailing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/IMG_0156.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8zn47-1iE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5000"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5002,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5000\/revisions\/5002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}