The day was spent crabbing and hanging out on the dock.  We had special guests make their way to the island via a short ferry ride.  My parents came to see us for a few hours and had lunch with us on the dock.  The kids were super excited to see them.  Fortunately they were able to bring me my jeans as I forgot all long pants for our 3 week adventure in Washington weather.

Don’t get too excited.  While this was a monster crab (about 8 inches) it was only 1 of 2 we caught all day!  pulling 4 pots from 150′ by hand from a small dinghy really gives you a workout.  A lot of work for not much reward.

To finish off our dismal day of crabbing our last pull (about 9:00pm) yielded one stuck crab pot.  Pulling the first 50′ feet felt kind of funny and extremely heavy.  At first I was excited that we finally caught the mother load, then everything came to a halt.  I could pull no further.  Even with Skylars help it would not budge.  So I did what any guy would do, tied it to the dinghy and cranked up the engine.  We pulled in every direction with no luck.  So the pot still sits there.  Hopefully its stuck to the commercial pot next-door and they will be back tomorrow to pull their pot and set mine free!

Day 1 of our 3 week family boating adventure.  We left Tacoma Yacht Club at 1pm to hit the incoming tide through the narrows.  Our destination today is the TYC outstation in Oro Bay on Anderson island.  The tide gave us a nice push giving us an extra 3-4 knots in some places.  We arrived at 2:40pm with 14.91 nautical miles under our keel.  In true fashion with only 1 hour 40 minutes run time Julie still slept most of the way.

Or mission for the 2 nights at Oro bay is to catch as many crab as possible for the “Hinckley family fun” family reunion to be held this weekend at Pirates Cove in Allen.  Upon arrival to the bay we didn’t notice many crab pots.  I thought crabbing this year was open Wednesday through Sunday but upon further investigation its actually Thursday through Monday.  So much for getting a jump on the crabbing today.

The kids fished without much success at the dock.  We had better luck trying out our new kayak!  Skylar loved it!  We also did some exploring in the bay with the dinghy.  The north end of the bay has a really cool salt water lagoon that fills up with water at high tide.  It feels more like going up a small river with wildlife all around.

Tomorrow crabbing starts early!