The Mid-Atlantic Sportsman: Crabbing (And Fishing) Report! 7-13-13

Myself and friends Tom and Dan decided to hit the Chester River on Saturday for a crabbing trip. I thought about baiting the trot line and probably should have, but decided we'd just crab with 30 traps.

We got to the ramp a little after 6 and dropped the pots around 6:30. After the first run we had 0 crabs, and we decided we needed to pick them up and try somewhere else. So of course while picking them up we ended up catching 9 nice keepers. So we decided to put them back out. Well the next few runs ended up being slow with only a couple crabs a run. We did some perch fishing in between and after catching a few initially that slowed down too.

I decided it was time to move so we headed across the river to a spot I did pretty well the week before. After dropping the traps we decided to look for some more perch and we hit the mother load.

We ended up fishing and crabbing for another 4 or 5 hours and ended up with a cooler full of perch and almost a bushel of nice Chester River crabs. I think if we would have ran a trot line with the traps we would have caught our bushel no problem.

It was still a great day on the bay and as we get later into the summer the Chester and other northern rivers on the Chesapeake should get better and better.