More About Crabbing

Just a few things that we have overheard/observed/learned from other people:

• salmon heads/trimmings work really well, except that this bait is quite pricey
• crabs seem to like Sockeye, just like we do
• Dungeness crabs like sandy areas while Red Rocks like rocky areas
• the crabs seem to come in before the high tide hours (seems to make sense, because they'd be swept in with the waves?)
• tide times for Belcarra are similar to the Deep Cove ones
• people have been more successful in catching males in May-June
• people have been more successful in catching crabs on cloudy/rainy days

Apparently every summer beginning around May there is a volunteer-based program that surveys the number, size, shell hardness, gender, and general condition of the crabs being caught. They also set up a kiddie pool with starfish and small crabs inside for kids to play with while they educate the kids on crabs. When the program begins for the day, the volunteers would go around the dock asking everyone crabbing whether they wish to be included in this survey. Those who agree to it get a number assigned to each trap, and you are supposed to report every crab that you catch to the volunteers so the crabs can be recorded. The ones that are female or undersized get tossed back with a number on the back while the legal ones are returned to you. This data would be submitted to Fisheries and Oceans Canada so they can monitor the crab population. What this program has found out this year is that a lot of the females do not have claws so people may have been just ripping them off then tossing the crabs back. Participation in this survey is therefore encouraged so awareness of malicious behaviours are exposed (and hopefully eventually stopped) before they can ruin the fun for the rest of us. After all, females need their claws to eat to survive and give birth to more crabs! :D

Crab-related information learned from the volunteers today were:

• 4/7 bullets from the beginning list
• crabs do not mount to mate; they only broadcast their gametes in the ocean and hope the gametes find each other
• it takes about 4 years for an "adult" crab (non-larvae stage) to moult into a legal size crab
• crabs can live up to about 13 years, but most don't make it that far, lol