Collecting Crab Pots | Alaska: The Next Generation

You'll learn as you're going and get older, you make your own shortcut. You’ll always make it back home.

Ready, Glyn? Oh, yeah. Glyn and I are off to pull out crab pots from Olga Bay, where he has one and I have one. And that increases our chances of getting crab. When we pull the crab pots, it's a long way, about thirty-forty minutes skiff ride. Out here on the open water, the weather is not always in our favor because of the swell that washes right up.

The crab pots we’re gonna pull are in a bay and it’s a lot calmer and a lot easier to get. We got to get everything before the winter hits. Otherwise, it's pretty hard to get up there. You get some wicked winds with tide flowing in and out. Driving around out here is like studying for a test. You got to memorize where all the rocks are, any reefs.

It's woo! Where is my buoy? It should be right here. You should see the buoy no matter how many whitecaps there are. It’s a big orange buoy. It’s just like my Uncle Marvin’s gear he has on. Mine should be real close around here. It’s just that small cork is very hard to see. If we find Glyn’s, I got a good bearing of where my crab pot is.

I don't see mine anywhere. Is that the cork right there, Glyn? Is that a cork? I think that’s your cork. We’re not finding Glyn’s crab pot, decreases the chance by half because not all the pulls we do are successful king crab.

Oh, you got that pipe out already, okay. I got you. Our chances now are cut in half by one pot missing, and hope we get something in this. There we go. Coming up, Glyn. You could stop it.

So, how’d we do? Whoa, look at that. Scored heavy. Like we scored, we are not going home empty-handed. There you go. Lot of females. So, I think we got a couple keepers, but there’s so much females, I’m very happy to see that.

Flip it over? Yeah. Oh, so happy to see females because I know that at least there’s some there to reproduce, and that's a very good sign. This is a female, Glyn. See how the female has a round belly? Big, big belly.

Oh, is that the eggs right there? You see them in there? Oh yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of eggs. Females. It's the future. If there's anything that we want, it is crab for the future. There’s a male to keep, how big he is. Keep her here?

Yeah. All right. I lost my pot, but I’m bringing food home. Good stuff, Glyn. Well worth the trip, even with half the crab pots. Found one crab pot, what's missing is my big orange buoy.