Crabs!

Betimes, the fish trade got a rather slow on the docks, and it required a bit of enterprise to keep abreast or two of the monger traffic; and towards these ends a double-ender wooden Alaska fishing vessel were acquired. She was a sturdy beast with a six-cylinder Caterpillar Marine Diesel set in her belly. My mate and I had spent two weeks getting to know each other and the Mary Jean, and affixing the new motor into the belly of the beast, it was not much of a task and the new diesel purred from the first start not needing any sort of a tuning. We had so much glee and confidence in the success of our mechanical efforts that we got a bellyful of our favourite and decided to chug out of the San Francisco Bay heading north up the coast to check on some previously set crab traps before they were lost to getting sanded in.

Just past the Golden Gate Bridge, the waves began to be right raucous, and we were crabbing straight away with the boat headed full throttle to the southwest while the actual motion was toward the northwest and an ominous set of rocks frothing surf blast known as the Potato Patch because it looks for all the world like whipped spuds. Our trajectory arced close enough to the Potato Patch to give us a few moments of uncertainty as to whether or not our trip out of the Bay were a Lost Cause, but then occurred a moment of Truth where the boat broke free of the pull of the incoming Tide and began moving in the direction in which her bow was aimed.

We no more than cleared the Golden Gate when the swell picked up remarkably to the point of being 30-40ft, and there was a Coast Guard boat honking and hailing us, and sweeping their scurvy spotlights, asking if we knew what we were about heading out to sea on so sordid a night neither fit for man nor fish, and we hailed back, "Fook-off, ya lubbers!" But despite all of that hail fellow well met with a barnacle crap, we'd left off the engine cover, and while it was as fun as surfin' up on the bridge, down in the galley, the tools and silverware was falling into the engine area due to the rough tidage, and my fear was that some stray implement would cause the engine to seize at this inopportune moment of rising expectations and surging sea. The long and the short of it were that when the silverware hit the fan, we determined that this would do for a test run of our mechanical installation, and that we should make for the port of Tiburon where there is excellent French press coffee and Brandy and long-legged blonde serving wenches, which we did.

We chugged up in calm water to the dock at the back of the restaurant, and tied her off. It were God awful quiet of a Sunday morning of a sudden without diesels and the crash of the surf. The restaurant had not officially opened, but a wench brought us a press of coffee nonetheless, and my mate soon returned with a fine rare brandy, all of this before eight in the ante meridian. We drank of coffee and brandy until our appetites awoke and the restaurant were open, then ate mightily of all that the local farms had to offer in exchange for things from the sea. After farting, belching, and a few cigars with our brandied coffee, we pushed off to secure our silverware out of the engine compartment, and swim a bit.

We made anchor down the hill from some Tiburon cliffdwellers, who seemed for the most part amused by out derelictions, and stowed everything in its place, stripped nude to dive and swim around the boat to clear the webs from our heads. After dressing in our spare fishing-person clothing, we started the engine to head north to our patch of some two hundred crab pots. Now, if yers have never dealt with crab pots, these what we got is about a meter wide and a third of a meter high made of steel rods and chicken wire. They have a trap door that lets the curious and hungry crabs in for the scent a taste of some herring parts what we set in a bait container inside, but the poor-rube crabs oncet they come in, they can't find their way out.

So, the other part of this story is that we are waiting for a big shipment of some fine Peruvian Lemonflake Cocaine and the MotherShip knows the colors of our floats and they drop their gifts with our colors in our crabpot patch, and we just go about our business of pulling up our crabpots, re-baiting them and throwing the crabs back down on ice, and if'n we are pulling some snow, that goes under the crabs and the ice. When we goes back in, maybe upon occasion the stray California Fish&Game Warden will check our crabs to see if they're all of legal size, but don't mess with my toot-toot.