Shorter Days

 Traveling back home at night is far more comfortable for a weary crew ( ... and an equally tired, faithful dog) inside of the cabin. Before Claw'd, the kids would sit in the bow of our old, open, center console boat joyfully spitting the hulls of sunflower seeds into the wind as it rushed by their innocent little heads. Of course, the wind was hurling passed them carrying their slimy seed hulls and slapping me in the face at 30 mph, not to mention the misting of the occasional ... 'dog sneeze'.  Now you know why that in any of the pictures of Capt. Dad, he's always wearing sunglasses.

For those who are following the blog regularly, you know that due to a heavily tangled line, we lost a trap to the deep. Our only hope was that there was enough line extended so that at low tide the buoy may be able to reach the surface. Dead low tide was at 5:10 PM. So the first thing we did is search for any sign of that lost pot. But, the pot was no where to be found. So the SCK's checked and set back all their pots, including an a new pot we had brought along to replace the one that was lost. After setting back I noticed one pot way out of line with the rest. We counted back and realized we had one more pot than we had set. When Josiah snagged the buoy, there was no slack of extra line and the motion of the boat moving forward threaten to pull him over. Every bit of line was stretched out tightly to break the surface. As it came up, there was a huge tangle of line. We recovered our lost pot!!!

Research Note: When we left the South Battery side of the harbor, the stone crab where plentiful. Yesterday was the first time we've  been back in months. The traps had a good number of good-size stone crab, however they were either harvested or had no claws at all. We go back tomorrow evening. Maybe it was an anomaly.