Rushing in for a couple days and then rushing back out before we did the shutdown boogie was, of course, Eddie Kim and family: "Ended up getting 42 Dungeness and 23 rockcod. Can't complain :)" There would be no sympathy if you did. The weather was good enough to head out of the bay for only part of one day, so these are some very good numbers. Inside the bay, Mr. Kim worked gear between Tom's Point and Sand Point. When I say that, I'm not being coy; he moved around the whole time and covered all of the channels (except the one behind Clam Island), some of them twice. Nobody else that I spoke with has done nearly as well, and the big tides the last few days have been bad for catching crab but good for selling gear. Those ripping outgoing tides are great for dragging light gear out of the bay and burying heavy gear under sand dunes. Clam tides and crab tides are different.

     The commercial crabbers get to drop their gear in another week or so. Northern waters get to drop pots on December 20 at 8:01 AM and the rest of the state gets to splash gear at 6:01 AM on the 22nd. The meager crabbing will not improve following the splashing. Commercial effort is likely to be high for the first week or so and then fade away, sort of like the crabbing (To be fair the crab, as a friend of mine once said, "started off slow and kind of tapered off from there."). More knowledgeable people tell me that Dungeness tend to run in a boom and bust cycle on about a six year cycle (about the time it takes to be commercial legal). It appears that we are approaching the bottom of the cycle (next year looks bad. Not many reported "clickers"). It is not surprising to note that if a certain year class has more adults then they will generate more babies. Why favor one year? It could be an ocean cycle of currents or temperatures, but my favorite theory is that it celebrates the anniversary of large, industrial-scale fishing of hake (Pacific whiting) which eat a lot of larval crab. It used to be that you could hardly escape the hake when salmon fishing, but now some people have never seen them before (lucky bastards). It is theoretically possible that suddenly removing a sizable portion of a predatory group will result in a similar increase in the number of the predated-upon species. So, next time you go through the drive-thru at McDonalds you should order the Filet-O-Fish; the crab you save could be your own.