Crabbing.

My dear friend Lindsay had a birthday last week and her boyfriend planned a flawlessly covert crabbing excursion for the weekend. She knew she was going crabbing, THAT was hard to disguise. She just didn't realize others were coming until we jumped out and screamed like hell in surprise. Surprises rule.

So five of us hopped into our teeny boat. The pots were all baited. Through the eyeball of a fish to be exact. Gross. On account of the sunshine I decided to forge ahead with my flip-flops as a shoe option and that worked about as long as it took us to pull up the first pot and lose one in the boat. It crawled on my bare foot. I shrieked like a baby in horror. I then put my rain boots on like a good girl.

The whole experience was surreal. We all fell into place in terms of our roles on Captain Lindsay's ship. I became the boat driver, the boys and Lindsay were the crab-pot-pullers as well as inspectors and measure-ers. We needed to verify two things: male or female and whether or not they were big enough. Females went back into the drink and the large-enough males were kept as prize. Erin was the boat photographer though I tried to sneak the occasional shot on my phone (posted here).

After three hours of throwing and pulling pots we caught somewhere between 12 and 14 crabs totaling 25 pounds. It was an incredible experience! Lindsay was fearless in her crab assessments and even survived a few harrowing pincher moments. I was totally impressed. I didn't realize it until the one tried to eat my foot that to me they seem a bit like spiders. And damn I hate spiders. The marina cooked and helped us clean all of our booty and sent us on our way. We made our way back to our campsite just in time to grab a beer and catch the sunset on the beach of the Oregon coast. Then we made a fire and sat around eating as many spiders as our stomachs would allow.

Happy Birthday, Linds! A magical weekend indeed.