Crabbing at the Cape

Cape Denbigh is my new favorite place in Shaktoolik. It is like the city park of Shaktoolik--everyone goes there to hang out and spend some time out of the house. Plus, there is even a slide! Here I am having a blast:



Silas, one of the ECE teachers (and the closest person I have as a peer out here) took me out crabbing last night, and we finally got home at 1:30 in the morning. I had to ride in the sled because I don't have my own rig, but it wasn't too bad. No wait, IT SUCKED. I was able to get "in the zone" and hit the bumpy sea ice just right when I felt the sled vault into the air. My back still feels like hamburger right now. But it was all worth it, for this:



Cha-ching! That's a red king crab, perfect sized and delicious to eat. Unfortunately, I'm holding the entire night's catch in that picture....it was just an unlucky day for us at the crab holes. They "hand line" for crabs out here. You just tie a piece of fresh trout (the crab's favorite) around a line with a weight (usually a spark plug), and wait for the crab to pinch onto it. Then you slowly pull the line up when it feels heavy, and the crab will hang on the whole time! No love for us though, and Silas even did the smart thing and dug our holes out around a crack in the sea ice:



We spent much time chopping the ice with an axe and using the eskimo ice-pick tool, called the "duoalk." I was an expert "duoalk"-er after a few holes, because we didn't have an ice-auger. Bud, the principal's husband, came out with us too. After a few holes he was pining for some "gas." We got all of our holes dug though, through about 1.5 feet of sea ice. There were a couple of other groups out crabbing last night too, but they fared quite a bit better than us. Here's Randy pulling up another big one, I think he got over 10 crabs last night:



Oh well, I'll have to return to Cape Denbigh some other time to try out another slide run I have nick-named, "Med-Evac Mountain":



That's actually a 200 foot or so drop. If I can only avoid the boulder at the bottom, it should be pretty fun. The other cliffs at Cape Denbigh are scaled by people in the summer looking for seagull eggs. That sounds way crazier than anything I'd try, these things look pretty sheer:



All in all, it was an awesome Friday night out in the country. It felt good just to get away from the village for a while, 12 miles away that is. Maybe another night of crabbing is in order down the road...