We made our first venture out crabbing recently. After finding a disappointing amount of information online for sport crabbing in the San Francisco bay area we decided to start this site. It's kind of a blog, and hopefully it will also kind of be a place for crabbing information. For now it's just kind of what it is. Anyway, someone on LiveJournal referred us to an online article from 1995 that mentioned a couple piers for Dungeness Crabs which is what we were looking for. I've 
only been rock crabbing in the bay at Fort Baker Pier in the past. One of the ones mentioned by the article was Pacifica Pier in, you guessed it, Pacifica!
So we grabbed the crab hoop we'd purchased in Bodega, drilled some holes in one of two plastic bins I had from camping, and headed off to pick up some bait, line, a bait cage, and some leather work gloves. I had learned during my rock crab excursions that those fellows are much more flexible than you might imagine and a claw pinch can leave a nice mark. I wasn't going near any of them with out some sturdy gloves. We started off visiting the grocery store for some chicken wings as bait. Then we headed to the West Marine in Mountain View only to discover that they had no bait cages and seemed generally quite confused. They did have the line and a crab gauge to replace the one we 
purchased in Bodega that went mysteriously missing. Since we hadn't found a bait cage and still needed work gloves we headed on to Home Depot. We ended up purchasing some 1-inch fencing material to build our own bait cage and some leather work gloves. We headed off for the pier not quite knowing what to expect.
The pier was busy, but not completely crowded. Most folks were fishing and a few were trying to use crab snares. A couple of the people fishing had dropped in crab hoops as kind of an after thought, but since they were rarely pulling them up I had trouble seeing how they could be expecting to catch much.
First off we just zip-tied the chicken wings to the bottom of the crab hoop in an effort to get it in the water quickly and take stock of the 
situation. Bengt set about meticulously making a bait cage and I watched as a pair of sea lions happily chased the crab hoops to the floor of the ocean. The pier was much higher than we expected. We had brought 50 feet of line and quickly realized that didn't quite get us to the floor and we were at the mid-point on the pier. I imagine it was even deeper at the end. Fortunately we had brought some extra line for pulling water up from the ocean in the event that we had to keep some crabs moist. We used the end of it to tie off the crab hoop's line to one of the concrete benches we had parked ourselves on.
We watched some of the other crabbers (is that a word?) and didn't see anyone pulling much of anything up, crab or otherwise, so we were coming to terms with the fact that we were unlikely to see much that day. We eventually pulled up some very under-sized 
crabs, but it was at least reassurance that our set up worked and we had to be doing something sort of right. The little guys got tossed back in and we actually were feeling kind of good considering some of the folks that had been there for the afternoon were starting to head home empty handed. I will say, fishing people are generally pretty friendly. A few are a little inappropriately loud due to excess beer consumption, but all seemed good natured.
We had thought we were likely the last people that were going to arrive at the pier that day since the sun was starting to drop a little, but new groups, particularly 20-somethings, seemed to continue to arrive into the late afternoon. We 
continued to see no yield for our efforts but amused ourselves watching the local wildlife. We repeatedly saw two dorsal fins playing around past the breaks to the left of the pier (if you are looking out at the ocean). I'm not quite sure what they are, but they surfaced pretty frequently and consistently in the area. Bengt suspects it was some type of mammal, but I haven't located much information about what types would be seen that easily from the coast. I guess I've always thought you needed binoculars to whale watch.
We decided to cast the hoop one more time before heading back home. We'd decided that a trip to a seafood restaurant on our way home would soothe our seafood lust even if we hadn't caught anything. On our last cast we finally pulled up a legal dungeness! Our first ever! We placed it in our crab transport device: two plastic tubs, the top one 
with holes drilled in it and lined with newspaper. A lesson learned from my first crabbing trip where our crabs all died because we just put them in a regular bucket of water. Oops! We nestled our prize safely under newspapers and generously soaked the papers with sea water, snapped on the lid and headed down the pier. We got a few admiring comments from other folks on the pier since it was one of the few dungies that anyone had caught that day. Since we'd only caught the one small dungie we kept to our seafood dinner plans and then headed home. Bengt cooked and cleaned our catch and we stashed in in the freezer, along with the carcass of a our 5lb valentines lobster, for making bisque. I haven't tried making bisque before so I'll have to let you know how that goes.