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FINALLY!!! After what seems like an eternity of waiting, construction is finally underway to rebuild the marina in Seabeck WA.

According to a recent article in the Kitsap Sun, 3 of the remaining partners of Olympic View Marina LLC have decided to ante up their own personal finances to fund the project.

The most recent delay occurred when the lender for the project pulled the financing plug in the 11th hour, even after the partners had successfully navigated a seemingly endless obstacle course of environmental red tape. Unfortunately, due to the recent economic downturn, the commercial lending pool has literally dried up, leaving Olympic View LLC with few viable options.

Hats off to these daring entrepreneurs for risking their own personal savings to make such a badly needed resource/improvement to the Seabeck area.

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com, SOUNDBITEBLOG, ActiveRain, Everyday CK, Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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During an upcoming public meeting scheduled for Feb. 4 thru 6 in Olympia, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission will consider adopting a new package of sportfishing rules for 2010-12, as well as updates to the Columbia River sturgeon management policy.

Of particular interest is a proposed change to the Dungeness Crab Season and Daily Limit. This past year when the season opened, recreational crabbing was allowed each week from Wednesday through Saturday, with a legal limit of 5 per day, per licensed person. The newly proposed rules would change the allowable days for crabbing to Friday through Monday, and reduce the legal limit down to 4 per day, per licensed person.

While the day changes are certainly welcome, it’s hard to swallow (or maybe I should say ‘not’ to swallow) the reduction in daily limits. This is the second time in recent years that the limit amount has been lowered.

The commission, a nine-member citizen panel appointed by the governor to set policy for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), will convene for its regular meeting Feb. 5-6 in Room 172 of the Natural Resources Building, 1111 Washington St. S.E. The meeting is scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. both days.

For more information, go to WA Dept of Fish & Wildlife

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com, SOUNDBITEBLOG, ActiveRain, Everyday CK, Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Just a friendly reminder….for local crabbing enthusiasts:

You have until January 15th 2010 to electronically submit your Dungeness Crab Catch Card numbers to the WA Dept of Fish & Wildlife

WA State law requires that ALL fishers record their catch of Dungeness Crab on their License Catch Record Card and return their cards by mail or report their catch numbers electronically on-line by the date printed on the Catch Card, even if you didn’t catch any crab.

To report your Dungeness Crab Catch Card amounts on-line, go HERE.

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com, SOUNDBITEBLOG, ActiveRain, Everyday CK, Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Okay, so I recently spent a few days down in California at my Dad’s place in San Luis Obispo. He had just recently undergone open heart surgery, and wanted me to play ‘Top Chef’ during his convalescent period.

Since he’s a lover of Pacific NW seafood, I brought a few tasty ingredients with me on the plane – frozen cracked crab meat from Hood Canal, some of my homemade smoked salmon, and some frozen Razor Clams that we dug up early last Spring.

I had perfected my own personal recipe for Dungeness Crab Pot Pies a few weeks earlier, so I thought I would try them out on him. Here’s the recipe:

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

1 lb. of Dungeness Crab Meat (or more if you’re a crabaholic like me!)

1 – 16oz. jar of creamy Alfredo sauce

1 cup of frozen fresh green peas

1 cup of baby carrots sliced

1 cup of sliced fresh mushrooms

1/4 cup of diced Walla Walla Sweet Onion

2 cloves of fresh garlic finely diced

1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper

1 package of pie crusts (usually comes in a 15oz. box w/ 2 rolled 9-in. crusts)

6 – 4in. diameter poreclin Ramekins

Combine all ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Roll out pie crust and use a ramekin to cut-out 6 pie tops. Puncture pie tops several times with fork. Spoon mixture liberally into each ramekin. Cover ramekins with pie tops. Place on cookie sheet and place into oven. Cook for 25-30 minutes.

Goes exceptionally well with a tossed Romaine salad, Sour Dough French Bread, and a glass of Pinot Grigio.

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com, SOUNDBITEBLOG, ActiveRain, Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Seems like everyone has their own unique or special way of cleaning Dungeness Crab. Some people bring their catch back live and steam them up whole. My Dad prefers it that way, so he can scoop out the ‘butter’ from the outer edges of the shell. That’s a bit too hardcore for me though.

I prefer to clean the crabs before we head back to the launch. Of course, we’re careful to retain the shells in the event that the Fish & Wildlife guys show up. Otherwise, cleaning the crabs before we head home means there’s more room in the pot, and less hassle with clean-up afterward.

Here’s a short video that we shot out on Hood Canal during the summer of 2008. It shows our method of cleaning the Dungeness Crabs quickly and efficiently. We strike then in the center of their under-body with an axe. This kills them instantly. Then each side of the inner body, with legs and claws attached, is twisted and peeled away from the shell. All that remains is to remove the lungs and rinse off any guts. We transport the cleaned crabs back home in a bucket of sea water taken from Hood Canal, and that’s what we use to cook them in. Enjoy the video!

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com and SOUNDBITEBLOG, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com and SOUNDBITEBLOG, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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One of the perils of recreational crabbing here in the Puget Sound WA is exposing yourself and your crabbing gear to potential thievery.

Okay, so maybe it’s not quite as perilous as the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch,” but it certainly is extremely annoying and frustrating!

We went out onto Hood Canal last Saturday afternoon to retrieve our crab pots, only to find 3 out of the 4 missing. The remaining pot had been picked clean.

There are instances (usually during the weekdays) when we don’t have a lot of time, and simply drop off our crab pots, leaving them out overnight. On the weekends, when we’re not in as much of a hurry, we’ll catch some rays, or tool over to Pleasant Harbor, while we wait for our pots to fill up.

Occasionally, it is entirely possible to set your pots too close to a steep underwater shelf, and have the current drag them into deeper water. But we dropped ours out at the peak of high tide, and left more than enough excess rope to compensate for any variables. It’s also highly unlikely that 3 pots, set at varying depths, would all strangely disappear, or that the 4th pot would be empty.

So, to you low-life crab pot crooks, I offer the following message:

Each of my crab pot buoys are marked with my name and phone number – Rich Jacobson (360) 440-4758. If you feel it necessary to pull up our pots and pilfer our crab, then at least leave the crab pots intact where you find them. We’ve always been very generous with the bounty of our catch and we don’t mind sharing some with you. But having to replace our gear is a huge pain and gets rather costly.

May the Creator of Crabbing Karma repay you for your dastardly deeds of Dungeness deprivation.

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com and SOUNDBITEBLOG, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Well, July 29th couldn’t come any faster to the Jacobson household. That was the day that the recreational crabbing season for Marine Zone 12 (Hood Canal) officially opened!

Our first pull of the season made the nearly month long delay well worth the wait. Our first pot yielded 8 exceptionally large keepers. Several were off the gauge, measuring over 8 inches in body shell span. We easily limited out at 15 and actually had to throw a couple smaller males back to remain within legal catch limits.

The second week proved almost as productive, catching 8 one day and 11 the next.

With the WA Dept. of Fish & Wildlife extending the current  season out until January 2, 2010, our mounting freezer stockpile  is guaranteed to keep us crab happy during the off-season.

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com and SOUNDBITEBLOG, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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Opinions on how to properly cook/boil/steam your freshly caught Hood Canal WA Dungeness crab can vary greatly among local yokels.

Many hardcore traditionalists insist on using some kind of crab boil spices like you would find offered by companies like Zatarains.

Some people insist on boiling/steaming the entire crab, relishing the prized ‘butter’ that collects on the outer edges of the inner body shell.

Personally, my preference is to clean the crabs while we’re still out on the water. A quick axe chop to the center of the underbody kills the crabs instantly. Each side is then easily peeled out of the body shell and cleaned.  We put the cleaned sides into a 5 gallon bucket filled with saltwater from Hood Canal. The bodies are retained until we get back into port, in the event that local Fish & Wildlife officers are lingering around, checking to see that everyone is following the rules.

Depending on the extent of our good fortune that day, we boil our bounty using the large aluminum pot and propane burner, using the saltwater we brought back with us from the Hood Canal. Cooking up just the cleaned ’sides’ allows you to cook more crab and eliminate loads of messy clean-up that result if you cook the crabs whole. We don’t add any spices into the water, preferring the natural flavor that boiling in the saltwater provides.

There is much debate over the actual time you should cook/boil your crab. We prefer to bring the water to a boil, drop in the crab half sides, bring them back to boil, drop the flame slightly, and cook for 10 minutes.

Once the crab is cooked, we dump them into a large bowl and cover with ice.

Some people use various untensils like crackers, mallets, or seafood forks, and dip their cooked crab into melted butter or cocktail sauce.

I just don’t have the time or the patience. I crack the crab legs with my teeth and simply pork out to my stomach’s content!

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Rich Jacobson is a licensed real estate professional providing knowledgeable empowerment and relentless representation for his clients of residential properties and vacant land throughout all of Kitsap County WA and portions of Pierce, Mason, and Jefferson Counties. You can also find him at KitsapLife.com and SOUNDBITEBLOG, or e-mail:  kitsapagent@gmail.com

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In years past, you had several local options on where you could purchase your crabbing gear supplies.

When we first moved here to Silverdale WA, I found some great bargains at a Pawn Shop over in downtown Poulsbo, just down from JJ’s Fish Restaurant. Unfortunately, they went out of business a few years back.

Kitsap Sports (just behind Macy’s Furniture store and Home Depot) has historically maintained a somewhat limited inventory, with typically higher prices.

Big Five Sports (located in the strip mall with Arby’s and Emerald City Smoothie) is known for their bargain prices, but their inventory of crabbing gear is extremely minimal.

As I had reported previously, in the face of bankruptcy proceedings, our local Sportsman Warehouse was recently purchased by UFA Cooperative Ltd., a company based out of Calgary, Canada, which currently operates 35 farm and ranch stores, 7 sporting goods stores, and 120 gas stations, mostly in western Canada. They operate under the name of Wholesale Sports.

I took a brief visit to Wholesale Sports here in Silverdale the other day (just one block east of Costco) and was pleasantly surprised to find an even greater selection of products than what had been previously inventoried by Sportsman’s Warehouse.

They carry the full range of Danielson products, including the most popular inexpensive collapsible crab trap for under $25.  You can outfit a complete crabbing rig for about $75 – which would include the trap, buoy kit w/ 100 ft. of poly rope, bait cage, weight kit, and 4-point harness kit.

The low end Danielson collapsible trap will usually last approximately 3 seasons, but Wholesale Sports also offers several other brands/styles that are more durable and naturally more expensive.

With the recreational crabbing season quickly approaching here in the Puget Sound, I would highly recommend a visit to Wholesale Sports in Silverdale WA, and stock up on all your crabbing gear needs!

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