Crabbing and Crabbing

[gutholmj]

At least down here in Tumwater, Saturday was a raging wind storm. It was bad enough that I got a message from work that the power was out and we were on generators. The forecast for Sunday looked hopeful though so Kim and I planned to go out to Hood Canal. We were going to try and meet up with Deep Diver at Flag Pole but we slept in way too late. Plan A out the window. Then I actually looked out the window. Plan B was looking pretty bad too. We still had 10-20 mile per hour winds in Tumwater. I packed up anyway and brought fishing poles assuming we would see 3' waves on Hood Canal and go fishing at Summit Lake instead. Well, thankfully I was way wrong. We arrived at the Potlatch boat ramp and things were glassy calm.

We launched the boat and dropped a crab pot on our way up to Sund Rock. As we were on our way up to Sund Rock we had one of the coolest experiences. There was a big school of salmon doing what I can only describe as porpoising. There were probably 30 or 40 of them going up and down as they swam near the surface with their dorsal fins coming out of the water. It was the highlight of the day.

When we got to Sund Rock, we could immediately see that the visibility was amazing. You could see bright objects on the bottom 20 feet below the boat. As you can see from the topside picture, it turned out to be a beautiful day. We had a great dive and enjoyed a nice lunch before pulling the anchor and heading back to Potlatch. As you can see in the photos, we saw plenty of crabs on the dive. Unfortunately when we picked up the crab pot, we only had 3 undersized Dungeness. We ate Pho for dinner instead. All in all, a great day. Dale, I'm sorry we missed you.

[deep diver]

Yea, we were supposed to do a semi night dive and get in the water at 6, but my buddy forgot that his cell phone alarm changed on it's own so we were an hour late getting in the water.

The water was fantastic, flagpole buoy was gone again, we swam out from shallows and released it ... again from shore. I think the line float is too heavy with muscles and lets the line drag around bottom on low tide and gets wrapped up in rocks.

Glad you made it out there .. although we were out of water by 10:30. Sorry we missed you

[LowDrag]

Nice report, sounds like fun. I need to get up to Sund Rock one of these days.