The Crabbing Obsession Continued

So I have been lazy and completely ditched this blog for a while ever since the 2nd post, hahaha. In short, these things have happened since then (in chronological order):

• Bought a Seahawk 2 from Walmart for $40. The whole set includes 2 plastic paddles, a hand pump, and the rubber boat. 
• Bought life jackets for both of us (by law in Canada), they are $50 (for me, I can't swim) and $20 (for Mr. Lilasaur, he can swim). Both from Army & Navy. 
• Also bought, from Army & Navy, a 28" square cage ($40) and an additional crescent folding trap ($25). Apparently this folding trap is better quality than the $10 one we bought, but they look the same...
• Took our new boat out on a cloudy day, and it actually rained pretty hard when we were paddling out to grab our cage. In my mind it looked like this, except the solid boat in the picture is replaced with our inflatable dingy. Caught our first 2 Dungeness crabs!! :D But one of them punctured our boat!! O_O Mr. Lilasaur was like, "OMG LET'S PADDLE FASTER!!!" Me: "NO YOU IDIOT, PUT YOUR FINGER THERE!!!" And so we paddled back to the shore with Mr. Lilasaur's finger plugging the hole, hahaha. It was an awesome day, so we went home shortly after. I guess we're low achievers, hahaha~ Here are some pictures of our loot from that day:    
• Taking the advice of someone by the dock, we went to buy a Vinyl Repair Kit from Canadian Tire, $10. It took one week to repair it properly. 
• The next week after that we caught our first legal Dungeness by the dock! :D Also dropped our bait cage in the ocean. 
• Went to Army & Navy again, bought a crab trap harness ($6), 2 x net bait traps ($4 each), 100ft lead core crabbing rope ($17). The lead core allows the rope to sink and prevent boats going by from cutting the rope.
• Lost all our new gadgets + the 28" cage the first day, within the first hour that we used them, because an amateur boater drove directly over our stuff, cutting the LEAD CORE rope T_T . We watched the boat until it docked at a house nearby. We were upset and crazy enough to actually track down the house using Google's Satellite View (thanks Google!)... and the person was apologetic/scared enough to offer us two of his smaller crabbing cages + a float. One was really rusty though, and actually scared us a little bit when it cut Mr. Lilasaur's hand, because he hasn't had a Tetanus shot in over 10 years :S 
• So Mr. Lilasaur likes to talk to his co-workers about his crabbing obsession, and found out that one of them loved to crab 10 years ago except that his wife is deathly paranoid about being on the ocean, and this co-worker had to prep everything every time. Passion was lost very quickly and he has all his equipment still in the garage. So we bought all of these from him for $200: the Seahawk 4 Sport Edition, a battery charger, a pair of very nice paddles that are extensible, an extra life jacket, a battery-powered pump (batteries are too expensive, so we haven't used it lol), a 1.5W electric motor (!), plus the motor mount. Super good deal. This is how the motor mounts on. Had to buy a marine battery from Walmart for approx $60 to complete this set. 
• Cruising the ocean was so much easier with our new toys. Our days of being afraid of having no energy to go back to the shore was over! Mr. Lilasaur liked being adventurous and wanted to try other crabbing spots, so we tried crabbing at spots where people can't usually access unless with a boat. Turns out crabs aren't eventually distributed on the ocean floor and instead like to gather at spots where people feed them with lots of food (where other crabbers are), so we actually didn't have much luck with other spots except for Red Rocks. The houses along the shore are absolutely gorgeous though, so we completely enjoyed that. That's why Mr. Lilasaur now aims to buy an ocean-view property with a private dock, hahaha~ Oh, a tip to make the battery last longer is to cruise on the LOWER POWERS. 
• We also tried crabbing near the Surrey Sailing Club in Crescent Beach, White Rock, BC. It was easier to launch our boat there because the ground was easier to step on with our bare feet, but since it was sandier our equipment also got much dirtier. The view was very boring to look at, it was all flat and you can only see sand. The current was too strong for our wimpy motor, because we had to cruise on the highest power in order to move against the current. There were also lots of jet skis on the water, and those made the ocean quite stinky & noisy. In addition to all of this, we only caught one  crab that was < 10 cm in the few hours that we were there, so we aren't going back for crabbing again - watching the sunset maybe. 
• Met an interesting gentleman biking slowly on the ocean on one of these. It looked quite effortless to bike on the ocean despite the somewhat big currents that arise when big boats go by. He said that one of those cost $1700 though. 

To this day, we still don't really have a conclusion of what is the best bait to use. We tried salmon trimmings for a few weeks but they don't work all the time. One thing that we use consistently has been crushed mussels and they always seem to attract crabs for a few throws after they've been crushed. Will have to update when we have a solution.

Since it is already September we probably have to stop crabbing soon because it is getting colder. Mr. Lilasaur read on the Internet that commercial fishermen crab around May and leave little for the summer seasons, so he says we should beat the fishermen at crabbing next year and start in March by the dock, hahaha. We will see.