While tied up in Reid Harbor on Stuart Island, we met a fellow named James Life; he works over at CSR Marine, one of the big boatyards in these parts. He spotted my AIS antenna right off the bat, which was noteworthy in and of itself.

Anyway, his family had some crab, which they were willing to share. Even better, they had enough Zyliss Seafood Crackers to go around.

This is a VERY handy tool for cracking crab, friendlier on the fingers than any other crab cracking tool I know.

Of course, a pair of rusty pliers from the tool box will do in a pinch, but the Zyliss Seafood Crackers are less than $7 each. Anybody who catches crab or lobster regularly should have at least a couple on hand.

By the way, James & family: Thanks for the crab!

We love clever folding crab traps. We’ve written in the past about the Flex Fold (here and here) and the Stow-B-Low (here). By the way, I saw the redesigned Stow-B-Low a few weeks ago, and I think it deserves another treatment here…stay tuned.

So anyway, here’s another folding crab trap…a simple ring-type trap that collapses to 1/3 the diameter of the large ring, using a flexible hoop material. It’s called the Coil-Away Flexible Crab Ring, by Crab King Inc.

And they’ve got a video proving that it can catch crab! The folding demonstration isn’t until the end.

Saturday was the big Seattle Yacht Club “Opening Day” celebration. It isn’t as if we don’t boat in the winter, but opening day marks a kind of boundary between cold winter boating and warm summer boating around here.

I was out on opening day. But it was a different kind of opening day…the first day of Puget Sound shrimp season! I bought my license online Friday evening, went out on the Sound, and came home with 60 shrimp! To be honest, I had a LOT of help catching them, from my friends Tom and Susan.

They supplied the gear and did all the work; I mostly took pictures and played with Rose Point Coastal Explorer 2.0 beta while my dad drove my boat around.

There were a lot of boats out, including plenty of C-Dories, of course. Seems like the C-Dories congregate anytime more than one is out on the water.

Does this happen with other makes? Do the owners of other distinctive boats with loyal followings—Boston Whalers, Grady Whites, Parkers, or Sea Sports—alter course to intercept when they spot a sister ship?

By the way, if it doesn’t look to much like “summertime boating” to you, it’s because it was cold and rainy all day! Sunday was beautiful, though; I worked in the garden at home.

Remember my too-clever downrigger mount for the Magma grill on my C-Dory? I’m pretty pleased with the solution I’ve got, but I can’t help but wonder if I might have done it all differently, had I known about Burnewiin’s robust and attractive line of universal gunnel mounts.I got to look at the Burnewiin hardware on a couple of boats today, an Ocean Sport at Islands Marine Center’s display (West 41), and an Everglades sport fisher (East 1020). I tell you, these are some of the nicest fishing rod holders you’ve ever seen! Set phasers on stun…
But really, rod holders are only one of the components you can plug into these deck sockets. They’ve got fender cleats, sheaths for fishing knives, and sockets for battens you might use to support a cockpit cover.

Plus, if you contact them directly, you can buy the raw socket hardware all by itself and…

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Let me first admit that I know very very little about fishing. Really.

Still, my daughters wanted fishing gear for Christmas, so Santa did his best, and they got fishing gear. Here’s Arwen fishing down in Ballard. It was cold that day, can you tell?

We’re going to learn more about fishing, I promise. In case you’re wondering, we didn’t catch anything this day. Are there any fish in the ship canal? I assume so. Salmon swim through there regularly, I know that. Did I mention I don’t know anything about fishing?

Personal Locater Beacons (PLBs) are intended to help authorities locate people needing rescue. But sometimes they can help rescue plain old stuff, too…as in the press release below, from ACR. There is also an online discussion about this incident at Florida Sportsman.

BOCA RATON, FL—NOVEMBER 12, 2007—According to government statistics, satellite detectable emergency beacons—EPIRBs and PLBs—have resulted in 291 rescues to date this year in the U.S.

The story starts early in the morning of October 19th when recreational fisherman Eric Pierce of Boca Raton returned to the dock after a night of swordfishing. While trailering his 31-foot sport fisherman, a fishing buddy grabbed Pierce’s fishing gear and set it on the dock—some $6,000-plus in gear, including a recently purchased ACR PLB.
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I recently acquired a Flex Fold Crab Trap. and my kids love it! I mean, they love playing with it in the living room. The cats don’t love it so much, but for those who want to know, you can trap a Siamese cat in a Flex Fold Crab Trap.

I took the Flex Fold to my boat, a C-Dory 22 Cruiser. This is a small boat with a flat bottom, so it doesn’t have a lot of stowage space. That’s one reason I’m attracted to collapsing crab traps such as the Flex Fold and the Stow-B-Low. I was able to find several spots on the boat where I could stow the Flex Fold completely out of the way. I omitted spaces already dedicated to items I want to keep clean and dry, such as food and clothing. Here are the spots that are left: (more…)

When fishing for deep-water varieties such as rockfish, walleye, black bass, lake trout, or groupers, you can run into a problem if you happen to hook smaller ones; you know…ones you have to throw back. This is because you can’t just “throw ‘em back!”

See, they can suffer from barotrauma—expansion or rupture of air bladders—when they’re brought up from deep waters. Barotrauma can cause stress, injury, and sometimes death. Especially if they float on the surface instead of sinking back down to their normal depth.

Über-fisherman Bill Shelton is not amused. “Ethical fishermen don’t leave floaters!” He sells all kinds of clever gadgets on his website at www.SheltonProducts.com. Among them, you’ll find the Shelton Fish Descender (SFD), a simple device used to decend fish with bloated air bladders back down to depths greater than 30 feet, allowing water pressure to recompress the fish’s air-bladder.

Shelton is all too aware that fisherman may be reluctant to spend extra time on fish they can’t keep anyway, so he’s designed the SFD to be quick and easy to use. With practice, it shouldn’t take much extra time at all, perhaps five or ten seconds per fish released. Here’s how it works: (more…)

Remember the Flex Fold crab trap? We took our video camera into Fisheries Supply, one of our favorite marine stores in Seattle, and tried out the exciting, flexing, folding action. Actually, this is a really nice accessory to keep on your boat for occasional crabbing. By no means the cheapest, but probably the best folding crab trap we’ve seen. Enjoy!

Click To Play

Okay. Well, I posted this, and then discovered that Mark Philbrook, inventor of the Flex Fold trap, posted a very thorough demonstration on YouTube a couple weeks back. And it’s a little embarassing… (more…)

Several weeks ago, we told you about an amazing folding crab trap called the Stow-B-Low Crab Pod. I’ve got a small boat, and I’m primarily a cruiser, but golly, I like crab. If only I could have a crab trap with me, all the time, without having an enormous, hideous rusty-pokey-snaggy thing monopolizing the cockpit. The Stow-B-Low seems like a great alternative. The only thing (besides the price) dissuading me is the fact that it doesn’t really LOOK like other crab traps you see. I don’t really know that much about crabbing. This rig MIGHT work great, but… Suffice to say I’m waiting to hear the good news before I buy one.

And then I stumbled across a serious competitor. Behold the Flex Fold Crab Trap.

This one ain’t cheap, either, but wow…it looks like a 3/4 scale version of the big commercial rigs. It has real gates. It’s made in Victoria, Canada, by a fellow named Mark Philbrook. It collapses in a really clever way, stowing into a bag that is just 17 inches in diameter and 2 inches thick. Heck, I’ve even got a spot like that on my boat. I think it may be time to procure a Stow-B-Low and a Flex Fold, and have us a crab-off! Manufacturers, please feel free to contact Navagear about providing review samples