I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to make my first post; seems like this is the right thread to introduce myself.

In the winter of 1976, I was visiting my hippie brother and the rest of his commune who were building a 72’ ferro-cement sailboat on the shores of Bellingham Bay. A friend of theirs had a couple of commercial crabpots set out right in front of their boat. They had some sort of arrangement with him where it was okay to pull the pots and remove the smaller keepers and females and leave the big ones in the pot.

In any case, I was hungry for fresh crab but the only watercraft available was a very heavy 14’ Birchcraft canoe and we couldn’t find any paddles so we used a couple of square nose shovels for propulsion. Imagine two grown men trying to coordinate an effort to pull a commercial pot in a 14’ canoe without tipping it over. Somehow we managed to pull a couple of pots and had a couple of limits scampering around the bottom of the canoe. We had to sit with our legs up over the gunwales to avoid the crabs. I was in the stern so this left the family jewels close enough to the crab claws to make me extremely uncomfortable and the crabs could get enough traction on the canoe stringers to climb up the sides.

So… while trying to keep my manhood intact and keep the crabs in the boat, all the while balancing on the gunwales with a now very heavy shovel paddle, my full grown black lab decides she needs to swim out and join us. Somehow I managed to get her up across my legs but she wasn’t very cooperative and she didn’t like the crabs at all. Now, on top of everything else, I’m soaking wet; my brother is laughing his ass off because with the additional weight of the mutt, the stern is riding mighty low in the water and the crabs are congregating right below my crotch.

My dog now decides she really needs to stand up because there are a couple dozen crabs scratching around right below her; I can’t paddle and keep the dog still and keep the crabs in the boat and keep my balance. A crab gets close enough to my crotch to get a grip on my Levis and we’re still a couple hundred feet from shore. I decide the dog has got to go so I threw her over the side and removed the crab from my Levis; in the process I darn near swamp the canoe. My bother, between laughing his ass off and trying to keep his balance, drops his shovel in the bay and for some reason shovels don’t float.

We are now down to one shovel and the dog is trying to get back in the canoe; my brother is laughing so hard he’s about ready to fall overboard. I can only paddle on one side of the canoe because the dog’s on the other and I can’t get going fast enough to out run the dog. I can tell you, trying to do a j-stroke with a square nose shovel with one hand while fending off crabs with the other is not easy.

When we finally made it to shore, my brother jumped out and since I was on the very end of the stern I ended up doing a half-gainer into the bay. The good news is… the dog didn’t drown, I didn’t get a discount vasectomy, I didn’t kill my brother and we didn’t lose a single crab.