First, a report I just received from Kelley Roy: "Willy, just a note to let you know we crabbed yesterday in the outer bay.

We dropped nets shallow and deep with both depths getting crab but the shallow probably did a little better than the deep. Some nice, very nice jumbos in the mix.

 We were able to get 3 decent limits - easy day."  Very nice. The outer bay has been pretty consistent when you can fish it from here. There's some blank spots and some great spots and a lot of in-between spots. Make sure you put your hoops in a not blank spot before you give them a soak. I have heard that 30 to 50 feet of water has been pretty good. 

     Gage and I saw a narrow window to get out and fish before the wind hit today, so we went for it. Upon arriving at the Landing to launch we saw three wardens writing tickets to some snare casters. No truck though, as they came in a boat. Upon their departure, they stopped and pulled two hoops in front of the Boathouse and kept them. Cameron trotted down to the water and asked the question: Why? One of the buoys was improperly marked (I'm guessing no GOID numbers) and the other had been in the water. unpulled, for over two hours. So, if you were wondering, yes, they check. Maybe not as much as they should be checking, but that's another reason to pull your hoops early and often. I don't know what the snare guys got ticketed for but I've seen some crab shells in the dumpsters that looked borderline legal and I know that when you're not catching keepers those clickers look awful tempting. Don't do it. I won't even keep ones that are barely legal, as pretty much all crab gauges are made fast and cheap, and what if mine is a little different than the warden's gauge? Nope. 

    So with a rejuvenated fear of God and wardens, Gage and I headed out. We dropped our four hoops in 40ish feet of water between the TB buoy and Dillon Beach. We went back and pulled the first one as soon as we had the last one in the water and it had a couple of short Dungeness, so we considered the spot as not blank and reset the hoop. Then off to rockfish. The rockfish bit pretty good today when you were on top of a school, but staying on a school got more and more difficult as the narrow wind window turned out to be narrower than we thought. We had to give up on the 150' of water spots in front of Bird and headed in to 50-60 feet where we finished the day with 18 schoolie rockfish (blues, blacks, Deacons, yellowtail and a canary) and a lingcod. The timer was ticking down on our two hour maximum soak so we had to go pull our hoops. The hoops ended up producing 14 keeper Dungeness. We probably would have caught more if we had stayed and worked them but when you try to do two things you end up kind of half-assing both of them, I've found. Still more than we can eat, so it was a good day, and off the water before noon and the combers started. I still had to carefully wash all the accumulated salt off of my sunglasses when we got back. It got choppy today. Even finishing "early" we weren't done cleaning and cooking crab until almost 3:00PM. First world problems.