Friday August 18, 2017

A bit of a lazy morning and the wind is up. After a while all 3 of us went out to check the prawn traps. There were about 20 (probably more) red rock crabs in each of the 2 Canadian style prawn traps, and not a single prawn. But we did see remnants of a prawn! It seems that the larger openings on these traps let the crabs in as well, and they just eat the bait and the waiting prawns! We also pulled up our US style prawn trap and it had 16 large spot prawns in it and only 1 very small crab. Byron pulled his up as well and, no prawns, just lots of crabs. Unfortunately, he managed to drop 1 of his prawn traps overboard while he was in the midst of changing the bait! And it wasn't attached to anything. So the plan is to just put them back in for a few hours and then pull them again so the crabs don't have a chance to "setup" in the traps. We gave Byron one of our traps so that he had a 2nd on his line and we only needed to put out 1 line instead of 2.

Also picked up the crab traps and Byron had 1 Dungeness and 1 Red Rock. Sue cooked them up for crab cakes! We picked up our crab traps and we also had 1 and 1. So Sue cooked those up as well for more crab cakes later.

Back to Spellbound for coffee and lunch. Apparently Byron and Sue are getting a Telus signal on their iPad, and we're getting nada where we are on our iPad, so we headed over to EG with iPad and laptop in hand. Of course *our* iPad could not get any signal while their's did, so I used theirs. Even so, there was just too much data to move around the link was just too fragile so it didn't work out well. Mac's are just not that great with slow data links. Byron and Greg checked and pulled in the prawn traps again, and we got another 60 odd prawns. Sue and I started cleaning the crab that she had already cooked. Then they returned with a few more very large red rock crabs to add to the bounty. So Sue cooked up those as well. Then we all sat around the table and cleaned mucho crab. We made a *huge* mess, but fortunately it was all contained on the table. The wind was up and blowing the boats around for most of the day, but it wasn't too too bad.

We went back to SB to feed and water the dog and get some supplies for dinner, then back to EG where Sue made crab cakes, I made a salad, and we each had a huge crab cocktail appetizer. Dinner was wonderful. We looked at some Haida Gwai photos and by the time we returned back to Spellbound, it was really dark. I don't know why, but it's still surprising.