Crab season opened today.  Josh and I took the boat out and dropped the pots while the carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, pulled back in to port.  We pulled the pots twice while we were waiting for the ship to dock since we couldn’t get our boat back to the slip.  While we were waiting we saw some old folks in a power boat pull right up to our pot and start hauling it out of the water.  They didn’t even check the name on the buoy to see if it was theirs! Josh and I were floating nearby and headed over to have them drop my fishing gear.  All they had to say was “Oops.”  We caught 2 crabs and went back in so I could get a haircut and some lunch. Natalie came back with us in the afternoon to pull the pots again.  I was expecting a mother load, full pots of crabs.  We didn’t catch another keeper that day.  It looks like 2 of our pots got cleaned out by someone else because there wasn’t a single crab in them.  The last pot had a few females in, so they got thrown back.

After resetting one of the pots we drifted across the line and it got fouled along the propellor and rudder.  Running the engine in reverse got the prop clear, but we were wrapped around the rudder post pretty tightly.  We pulled the pot up and dropped the anchor to stop drifting through the sea of crab pots. I stripped down to my skivvies and grabbed my swim mask and hopped in the water to clear the line. It was COLD. I’ve never felt water so cold in my life. Immediately I felt my body tense up and my heart rate skyrocket. I swam to the stern and grabbed the ladder and pulled the line around and down off the rudder and we were clear again. It was wild being under the boat as the stern was lifting 8 inches out of the water and then slapping up and down as waves and wakes went by. Soon enough I was standing in the cockpit dripping, goosebumped and shivering drying off with Koku’s boat towel. We threw the pot back in the water and headed over to Scuttlebutt for dinner.