Chad and Dungeness

Take what God gives you. Good friend Chad Hood talks about his early days working up in Juneau, Alaska, for the Forest Service: “In the early years when I was in Alaska, necessity drove a lot of my different adventures because I just didn't have the resources to do much and I had to go outside of the normal channels, you might say. And so I was actually on a work trip and we were on a live aboard boat, which was not uncommon back then when I was working for the Forest Service, we would go in these remote regions to do field work and we were scheduled to leave back to Juneau and the weather was really bad. So we got weathered out a couple of days and my boss says, well, there's a minus 4 tide tomorrow morning. Why don't we go pick crab from the beach? Of course, the light bulb started going off in my head. What are you talking about? Because I had no idea what it meant. So we get up at probably 5 a.m. that morning and we get dropped off on the mudflats. The tides’ really far out. So we start walking around and all these Dungeness crab were buried in the mud. So when the tides get really low, they don't go out with the water. They bury in the mud. And so we filled up a five gallon bucket with Dungeness crab in a half hour. And that was the start of a new way of harvesting. And so from that day on, I started teaching all the other new people that had no ability to throw crab pots out that you find a Dungey area on a low tide. And you can just take them from the beach.