9/14/07

This update is from Winchester Bay, Oregon, where we are parked at Salmon Harbor Marina near the crabbing dock. There are about 8 rigs of RoVing Rods here so we have been having good social times with old friends. Unfortunately, the crabbing has been pretty slow, and the few crabs we have been catching are fairly soft, so they aren’t full of meat. The salmon fishing has also been dismal, although yesterday when we walked around the point, the fishermen there said that 8 chinooks had been caught. We saw one of them and it was HUGE. The weather has been changing a lot. The first day we were here it was so windy we could hardly have Happy Hour. The next day was so sunny, everyone was wearing tee shirts. Since then it has been mostly overcast, but fairly calm. Today was an absolutely beautiful day with sunshine and no wind – hooray!

Because of the slow crabbing, we took our time getting our inflatable boat set up and our crab traps out. We had 5 traps and we put them out 2 days ago. Yesterday we went out in the morning to check them and two of them had been stolen!! Boy, we were pissed!! The sad thing is that it seems that these incidents are becoming more common up here. Chuck has had his crab traps stripped several times, but at least they didn’t steal them. Cotton and Betty never leave their traps out unattended. They take their boat out and set their traps, then wait a while and pull them a few times, then bring them in. John and Vi bought a new trap yesterday and it cost $28. He already had a rope , bait box, and a buoy for it, so that would have added to the cost if he didn’t have them. You can see that when a trap is stolen, it costs about $40 to replace everything. This year a license costs $16.50, and there is the daily cost of bait, gas for the boat, etc. So crabbing can be a fairly expensive proposition. Of course, compared to the cost of buying crab, it isn’t. Plus it is fun.

Because we weren’t spending a lot of time crabbing when we first got here, we decided to can some tuna. We have to buy this because we can’t take our boat out on the ocean to catch it ourselves. Often they have to go out over 100 miles to get them. This year tuna costs $1.85 a pound for a whole fish, which means once it is filleted, you get about half waste and half fish, making it $3.70 a pound. We brine it and smoke it before canning it and it is delicious. We are also hoping to can some crab, as we have in past years, but if things don’t pick up on the crab catching, we won’t have enough to do this.

Pictures will be added to this blog in a few days.