A Day of Fishing

April 4th (Saturday)

Today we decided to go out fishing.  The sky was mostly cloudy, but it looked like it wanted to get sunnier and the forecast had been for a mix of sun and cloud.  We bundled up well; I even wore my long johns, because it was not warm out.

On our way out we set our crab trap with just a couple little pieces of bait with the plan that we would get some fish and then put the carcasses in at the end of the day.  We then set our prawn trap with the rest of our bag of bait and headed to the area of Wallace Bay.

Unfortunately, although it had seemed quite calm at the dock, there was enough of a north wind blowing on an angle along Cousins Inlet that when we tried to do our drift lines out in front of Wallace Bay we found ourselves always blowing in towards shore.  We seemed unable to drift on the course that we wanted, but we persisted.  

Since we were out there, we stayed out there fishing, trying different areas and different drifts until after 17:00, but with little luck.  All we got was a few small Walleye Pollocks, but nothing worth keeping to eat.  While jigging I had somehow managed to hook a small fish right through the brain.  It seemingly had died instantly, it did not fight at all on the way up, and it was completely limp when I got it off the hook, so we did end up with one fish for the crab trap.  

On our way home we stopped at our crab trap, by this point we were somewhat chilled despite all of our layers and we were looking forward to getting back home and into the warmth.  When we pulled up our crab trap we had four large male Dungeness. We put in our one small fish and re-set the trap.  

We cooked up the crabs when we got home, but were disappointed to find that two of the four crabs had recently molted.  We have been trying to figure out some way to tell which crabs have freshly molted before we kill and cook them, but so far we cannot tell.  It was too bad, because we would have much rather have let these ones go.  The quantity of meat inside is incredibly different from that which we get from a crab that is full.  Once they are cooked, we can tell even before we start cleaning them, that they have recently molted because their colour is different, but while they are still alive they appear the same as the other crabs. 

For dinner, while I cleaned crab, Jason made us an awesome crab pasta.  He used butternut squash as a base for a deliciously creamy sauce, and the result was one of the best pastas I had ever had.  We had this as a side with a piece of baked halibut.  Yummy!!