Lower Potomac 8/2-3/2024

[Derwood]

15 traps
necks -- added perch as I caught them
8-10 feet was best
Crabbed falling tide both days
~50 keepers

These were some of my best couple days of crabbing ever. I was out with my brother and my early elementary age sons. On our first runs, about 1/4 traps had a nice crab in it. Love that. My boys love crabbing and pulling the traps, but of course there is a little bit of operator error involved with the little kids working the lines. Once they got tired and my brother took over pulling, every single trap had a crab in it and we were able to cull for quality. That's never happened before. This is my fifth year crabbing and I'm finally starting to figure some things out! 

All crabs were good and hard -- size was 6-7 inches, with a few even bigger than that. The bigger jimmies were all doubles with females. We fished for perch and croakers in the creek between trap runs and that was also amazingly easy. I was using two hooks with a sinker rigs with home caught earthworms and we'd get a bite within a minute or so on every line. So we were able to save the bigger perch and croakers for dinner and use the small ones for crab bait. The perch outperformed the necks as bait. We caught about two dozen on Friday afternoon and another three dozen on Saturday morning, which contributed to two very tasty meals with some brats, smoked chicken, corn, tomatoes and melons on the side. Crab on.