Crabbing Whidbey island style

We were surrounded by a pod of orca whales!

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, summer time often means crabbing.  On Penn Cove on Whidbey Island, our crab season opens Fourth of July weekend. Sometime toward the end of June, my husband Paul and I head over to our local hardware store to purchase our shellfish licenses. Then Paul makes sure our crab traps or "pots" are in good working order. A crab pot is an enclosed framework of wire with four one-way openings. The openings are constructed so that when the crab enters to eat the bait, it cannot escape and becomes trapped. The bait is held within a small wire basket inside the trap. We use chicken legs from the grocery store as bait.

Each crab pot is equipped with a 100 foot weighted line with a red and white Styrofoam float at the end. The float needs to have your name, address and phone number on it so that, should the pot become lost, there is a way to identify it and get it returned to its owner. In Washington, you are allowed to crab Thursday through Monday. Each person with a license is allowed to keep five legal-sized male crabs a day. So, Paul and I could get up to ten crab a day as long as they find their way into our pots.

A few years ago our luck was less than stellar when it came to catching crab. Either we would pull up the pots to find them empty or they would contain only females. One time Paul hauled up a trap, encouraged by the heaviness he felt in the line, only to discover an enormous sea star taking up residence inside the wire cage.

When we mentioned our lack of crabbing success to our friends they told us, "You have to go out by the green buoy to drop your pots." The green buoy is a marker out in the mouth of Penn Cove designating the channel for boats. We figured we didn't have anything to lose and decided to go ahead and try the new "crab spot." On a Saturday afternoon, we motored our boat out to the green buoy and threw each pot overboard. It was deeper out in the channel and quite a bit of line was let out before the pots hit bottom. We headed back to the boat launch with our fingers crossed as the red and white floats marking our pots bobbed gently behind us.

It just so happened that Paul's mom Berna and her friend Les came up to visit us that weekend. Les wanted to join us when we pulled the pots on Sunday afternoon. The weather was fine as Paul backed our boat down the ramp at the launch. Berna, sitting on a bench under a tree, waved to us as we motored out into the cove. The water was relatively calm as we cruised toward the green buoy. We could see it in the distance along with other crab boats picking up their pots. As we approached the buoy, occasionally a white foamy splash could be seen rising from the water. "Wow," I said, "it looks like it's getting rough out there. Check out those white caps." Paul and Les followed my gaze and suddenly a "Y" shaped gleaming black and white tail appeared out of the water about fifty feet from our boat. To our right, two slim triangular dorsal fins broke the water's surface. Beyond the bow of the boat, an enormous black and white, rocket-shaped form with black fins on either side rose out of the water and fell backwards with a tremendous splash. We were surrounded by a pod of orca whales!

By this time, we had reached the floats marking our crab pots. As Paul began to pull up the first of our pots, the orcas continued to cavort all around us. When I finally took my eyes off of the marine show going on around us, I realized Paul was having a heck of a time pulling the first trap into the boat. He lifted the trap from the water and it was absolutely stuffed with huge crab!  Paul was a bit frantic as he tried to remove the "keeper" crabs (A.K.A. the legal sized males) from the trap. Not an easy task, when you're trying to disentangle large, angry, snapping crabs and retain possession of all of your fingers. Paul tried to get our attention to give him a hand. "Hey, a little help here!" he cried. I refocused my attention to keeping count of our catch as Paul threw the crabs into a five gallon bucket for storage. We got seven "keepers" from the first pot and we had two more crab pots to go. When we pulled the second pot and found it jammed with crab we knew we were going to easily reach our limit and have to throw back some lucky crab. Through it all, the orcas continued to leap and frolic around us.

Finally, with all of the crab pots pulled and the keeper crabs stored in our buckets, we headed back to the launch. Les looked delighted. Not only did he have a fresh crab supper to look forward to, he had just witnessed an amazing "whale show" the likes of which few people ever get to experience. In fact, in our 15 years of living and crabbing on Whidbey island, it was the first time we had seen orcas in Penn Cove. He turned to us and asked, "Wow, is it always like this when you go out crabbing?" Paul and I looked at each other thinking of all of the times we pulled up our traps to find them empty with nary a whale in sight and answered "Yep! All of the time"



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10x8 inches, oil on linen canvas, 2016

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These cows live on my friend farmer Fran’s Whidbey island farm. Cows are quirky creatures. They’re very timid yet very curious. If you walk up to the fence of a pasture containing cows and wait patiently and quietly you will soon become the object of a bovine inspection. If its a beautiful day and you have the time its a lovely experience to slow down and observe these gentle souls.