Catch and Cook: DELICIOUS Dungeness Crab on the Rocks!!

and at the gym again been a while since I've been out here doesn't look like there's anybody out here today so I've got these crab snares that I'm gonna be using homemade I feel like if you can make your own crab snares your chances of catching crab are 10 times better than they would be with any store-bought ones especially if you know that the design to make but it's a long walk out there so get our bucket charcoal got a pot we're gonna cook up the crab if we catch any but yeah it's long walk out there so let's go when you're walking out to the jetty it always helps to walk on the sand as far out as you can so if you come out I here at low tide you can pretty much get to about the halfway point to where you want to get to and when you finally get to the spot where you can't walk any further because it just gets too wet well then it's time to climb up on the rocks [Music] all right that's a good place to set up right up out here and one thing I always look for when I'm trying to set up in a spot it's always looking for a good place to land the fish or the crab whatever I'm going for there's not too many rocks right here and I know I could stand right here if I need to and hoist those crab right up good little flat area too so now when it comes to crab steering you really don't need any fancy gear or anything like that all that matters is that your gear is heavy-duty and look at this old rod that I've had had this thing for about five years you can see the tip there's no I on the last tip got broken off but still works just fine for a crabbing rod and my crab snares when I was making these I forgot to put the rubber band on here to keep the cage closed so I've got some hair ties and my girlfriend gave me and some paper clips to keep it on so you know crab steering just need a heavy-duty gear and you can pretty much jerry-rigged anything as long as you can get bait in the water and have that crab snare just sit in one spot you're likely to catch some crab now I'm not gonna go into detail about all the technicalities on best locations the best time to swell rod reel and everything I did that already I have a video out on that already I think it's called the comprehensive guide to crab snaring or something this little card right here should be popping up right now there's a lot of information in that every single thing you need to know about how to up your chances for crabbing is on that video so I'm using squid right now but my goal is to try to catch some smelt and throw those in this one of these snares smelt I feel like is one of the secret baits that really do amazing for crab and I'm really stuffing this thing full so I can get a good scent trail out there in the water and I've got a four ounce weight here sometimes I use the 5 ounce and I like the weight on the outside especially a pyramid weight as once it sinks it sinks down like this the weight gets stuck in the water like that so it doesn't move around and when you got these snare loops up like that instead of laying flat on the ground I feel like there's a lot better chance of a crab getting caught in those so let's close this thing up all the way with the hair tie cast it out alright let's do it now one tip that I can give for casting because I see a lot of people trying to cast these snares out and they don't get too much distance is you got to think of your rod as a spring as a catapult so when your bat when you got your snare or your weight behind you like this you got to give it a bounce bounce and when it bounces up that's when you cast it so it bounced so it's like you're using a tool and you let the tool do the work for you and now just like that old infomercial says set it and forget it so it's good to take depending where you're at depending how fast the crab bite is anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes that's how long I like to leave the snare out there it is 950 right now I'll check this one at 10 o'clock and I've also got another rod so now I'm rigging up a seviche to my braided line and I'm going to show you a little knot it's like the improved clinch knot except this is like the super improved clinch knot so you do it just like you normally would you know five or six twists on the braid you put your tag in straight through that now normally on the improved clinch knot you just put that tag in straight right back through there right so you do that except you do it one time and you wrap it around put it back in again and you can even do it three times and that strengthens the not even more than the improved clinch knot so let me give this a little bit of Lube pull it up and then down and that's like the extra-special clinch not that thing is not gonna go anywhere all right it's actually been about 15 minutes for this one so let's see if we can get anything on here make sure my drag is tight I'll tighten it all the way don't want that drag to slip when you start reeling in we're gonna just tighten the line first tighten it up a little bit pull it in just a little bit see if there's any crabs feeding on it we put in I don't think I have anything on this one no I do have little one so now the trick is you want to go slow when you get up to this point all those Dungeness crab out there female but it's small but I'm saying when you get up to the point right where you're gonna land it a lot of people make the mistake of reeling in fast they kind of panic but if you do that then the snare loops open so you want to keep your reel very slow and bring it in just that slow and bring it up and over that's a female you could tell by the carapace on the bottom it's not appointed apron right there not the carapace the apron on the bottom that's the female that's good sign at least at least there's some Dungeness crab out here though we're back well the hair tie and the paper tip clip are doing well let's get this thing back out there I got one more rod right here and let's see how this one does do the same thing make sure the drag is tight oh yeah oh man I had one ding oh I feel like you had there was a good one on there missing though felt heavy too damn all right this one feels pretty heavy something on here well to small donesies one rock crab so far hopefully hopefully some mail start biting all right now Plan B I've got a bucket full of water got my cebiche there's a little fish well that's actually not bad because I was hoping to get one of these and use it for bait so I caught this smelt right and I said that they're really good bait really really good bait for crab and what's cool about them look oh my gosh that was too close I don't know how it didn't fall between the rocks geez anyway I was saying all right all right all right hey hey hey hey all right you know what just for that okay so what I was saying is that these things are like perfect size for the crab snare to cut one in half it'll fit perfectly in the crab snare so right about there so let's give this a try smelt right there that's a little too big actually let's see if we could squeeze them in there he is he fits perfectly I feel like this is gonna have a lot more luck than match the squid so let's let's see only way one way to find out so this is the one with the smelt nothing man maybe this is why I haven't seen too many crabs in their reports come in for Dungeness crab seems like it's just been slow lots of small females a lot of rock crabs small males and you know honestly if I don't catch any keepers or if I don't catch anything big that I would want to put on a on a video normally I would just scrap this footage completely but I made a second channel called fisherman's low-key life I know I mentioned it earlier but it just gives me the opportunity and the freedom to post whatever I want so like a day like today where I don't necessarily catch anything worth making a video in my opinion I still would like to make a video out of it because I do have the footage so if you are interested in seeing a trip like this that doesn't exactly go as planned then feel free to subscribe to that second channel but I'm gonna give this another 30 45 more minutes if I don't catch anything I'm just going to head out nope that feels good that feels really good this is my last one I'm about to leave to definitely a crab now if it's a keeper I don't well that's a huge oh hey that's keeper keeper keeper crab keeper Dungeness big one - that's huge got his whole claw there we go that is what I'm going for me I was just about to leave - looks like I'm gonna rebate Wow look at that I think it's huge that's a big crab right there heck yeah it's literally packing up - so to keep these guys they need to be five and three-quarter inches and this guy is over six and a quarter they need to go from that line to that line right there and that one is nearly the length of the entire measuring tape so that's a big crab I'm gonna put it in my bucket rebate again and cast out might as well got me my keeper finally all right well I'm going to be cooking up that crab right here so I've got all my coals I think I'm just going to use all the coals in here and there's plastic on the outside of this bag put it inside it's just straight it's just coals and paper someone like that entire stack of paper right there we go the papers burn and hopefully it transfers to the coals all right yeah it looks like it's going good so I'm going to let these heat for 15 minutes and while I do that got my pan here and we're going to fill it up with some saltwater and that's what I'm gonna dump on here and that's what's going to boil the water so how am I going to cook this is I'm going to take off the carapace which is the head here and I'm going to cook the body and the leg separately now the thing if you're going to cook a meal out in the open public like this where you catch it there's still rules and regulations so the minimum size is five and three-quarter inches and how you tell is from the carapace so if you cook it you can't just bash the head just demolish everything you got to keep the carapace in one whole piece so there are two ways that I can recommend to get this out and you can kill the crab instantly cause it as minimal suffering as possible and the carapace comes out to its mouth right here right here so this whole thing is going to come off including the mouth so the way that you can get that off you grab all the legs and everything and you find a rock or a brick or something like that you hold the legs and just smash it off and the whole carapace will come off instant crab death it's like you curb stop it you know another way simple fold all the legs underneath and then what you want to do is just grab the carapace as close to the legs close to the center as possible as close to the apron as possible and just rip it off one go like that crab is dead you got the whole carapace here so if any Department of Fish and Game people come out and they are like what did you just eat you'll be like I just stayed this and this is his head go ahead and measure it and let me leave me alone not measured from spine to spine but you measure from right above the spine to right above the spine so after you take the carapace off you can take the apron part off which is the end there Ripoff it's the what do you call these the dead man's fingers on the side its gills where it breathes and then you can break it in half split it in half just like that once like that back the other way and there are some guts inside if you don't want to eat that which I am not 100% sure but I think the Department of fishing game still says don't eat that just for a chance of domoic acid but you can shake that out and it'll all come out and what you're left with is just beautiful meat and where its head and mouth was you can rip that out also both sides and if you wanted to if you had a brush or something you can brush all its claws you can brush this claws and brush its legs and brush everything off and all the little bits the dirt will come off but a little bit of dirt never hurt anybody so alright that's cleaned up ready to go now just waiting for the coals to heat up get some salt water and put it on the coals alright guys waters just about boiling now so the two pieces ready to go that those coals out here took about fifteen minutes to get this water to boiling right now pretty good for being cold and windy drop those guys in there all right let me try to feed some of that heat in with my mild pan all right let's see you set the timer now 20 minutes 15 minutes 15 to 20 minutes all right well you know what I think I'm gonna call it good let's pour this water off and see how it looks smells like it's done knowing me I might just just bill the crab out here how many times have I done that in previous videos with the abalone and fish yeah I would say that that's done take a look looking good huh smells great I bet anybody else on this jetty smelling these charcoals too is like damn what is that somebody's cooking barbecue out here all right let's let that look that cool off right there and I gotta have some kind of sauce so you know I got the butter let that heat up on here first a little bit oh man actually let's try this with no butter first break off a piece so all right as that melts down each leg and each claw has this knuckle here and inside the middle of the body that's where a ton of meat is so if you just break off from where that knuckle is normally I would just eat this off like this but to show you all that meat right there damn you know that's so good there's oh my god is so sweet it's crazy how a crab like this can have so much flavor and you don't add any seasoning at all it's just like naturally sweet like what kind of meat is naturally sweet like that damn that's good oh and then you add a little bit of butter do you cannot beat that whoa hey yeah god it's so much more satisfying after your fishing all day and you think you're gonna go home skunked and last cast literally the last cast you pull up on something huge and you're like what could this be could this be two crabs could this be some kelp and then it's a six and a half inch Dungeness crab man all that meat right there see that all right butters melted see that crap right there oh man you know dip it into the butter oh my god really don't even need any butter honestly these males they're always a little bit bigger than the females so like one of my favorite things to do when eating crab is you get that knuckle they're all that's meat right here look the whole thing that's all meat right there on the end so rather than just biting it off like that if you got some butter or you got some kind of dip or whatever dip it in there shake off the excess and you really don't need a shell cracker you don't need a cracker or anything you can just use your teeth and you should be able to get the meat out in one whole chunk oh my goodness look at that you know these Dungeness crab are the epitome of crab edible crab that's just on one leg I got eight of those and I got the knuckles from the inside and I got the claws even if you catch crap like this and you don't cook it out here on the rocks or in the beach it's still so satisfying to bring it home knowing that you caught it yourself and all you need is just the crab and a little bit of butter I swear just a little bit of butter and that's the perfect combination for almost any seafood I don't know why butter goes so well with seafood one quick plug I was sold out of these t-shirts they're all back in stock so if you want fisherman's life net and this crab season it goes from the first Saturday in November every year until June 30th or so if you're south of Mendocino and July 30th if you're north of Mendocino all right and before I finish up eating I wanted to talk about the regulations real quick so they change something this year before you could crab snare all year round because rock crab they're open all year round you keep 35 of those a day but now they made it so you cannot use crab snares when the Dungeness season is closed so from June to November you cannot use crab snares even if you're going for rock crab I guess that's because they don't want you to accidentally snare a Dungeness all right let's see how I can describe this it's like very rich very sweet like has a meat texture like chicken but the thing that stands out the most is just how sweet it is this is good and you want to do somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes for a crab this size oh my gosh not really have anything else to say I'm just like speechless enjoying myself over here now besides those knuckle pieces another one of my favorite parts is on the claws if you can crack the claws all the way what you're left is just this little shell right here but all this on top is meat something about holding something and then dipping it is this is what what gets to me and this could that that big piece that was what's holding that meat on there [Music] well that's about gonna do it [Applause] [Applause] you

Channel: Fisherman's Life

Views: 3,358,521

Rating: 4.8322649 out of 5

Keywords: catch and cook, catch n cook, fishermans life, dungeness crab cooking, how to eat dungeness crab, matts withans, tarra darra bros catch and cook, catch and cook fish, fishing, catch and cook crab, miller wilson catch and cook, dungeness crab fishing, dungness crab recipe, fishing fails, fishermans life crab

Id: 2nU59AjQTLo

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018