Crabs!

On Saturday I went up to Whidbey Island and dove off Polnell Point for dungeness crab. This was my first time actually finding any dungeness crab of size, and it was a lot of fun! It was a bit different than diving Tolmie State Park - there the ground was covered in a ton of macro algae and we just sorted through it to find crab. At Polnell Point, we actually were poking the ground where it looked 'funny' to find buried dungies. Actually, when there was only a couple of times that I poked the ground and found a dungie without seeing it. Their little 'feelers' stick out of the ground a little and I spot them quite easily. All in all, we bagged 14 male crabs >6.25" in width - I took my 5 and the guy I went with gave me three of his, for a total of 8 crabs! :) Other really neat things I saw on the dive included a big orange sea pen, lots of tiny little sea pens, lots of sea cucumbers with their 'butts' sticking out of the ground (one even had the color of the sea apple!), and lots of other neat little critters. Did three dives, technically, but the last one was just to finish off my 1000psi and look for one last crab. It didn't last very long at 45' but we bagged a nice one right away, only to find out we had a crab that was molting so had to throw it back. So we were still short one, but it was good anyways :)

There's nothing better than cracking open freshly cooked crab with a hammer and drinking beer after a long day's worth of diving!