By Seán Malone and John Sweetman
Seán and I grew up on the beach and spent a lot of days just wandering aimlessly looking for edible or merely interesting sealife and valuable beach treasures, which our moms generally classified as “junk.”
We had other diversions beside combing the beach. One was riding our bikes to the landfill on Bank Road to hunt for usable garbage. Shorty Grimalski was always at the garbage dump, collecting food for his angleworms. If we found instant coffee, Shorty required you to give the coffee to him. The most plentiful instant coffee was found when the soldiers at the AA battery were required to eat C-rations once a month for training purposes. A lot of their C-rations ended up at the dump. We fought when we found the unopened cans, especially the cans of pemmican.
Decades later, we still have that beachcombing propensity, although now we no longer wade into the tide to scoop up crabs, nor do we fill our pockets with stinky found objects because we have a … skiff type boat. It has a name … “The Crabber” and has a motor and things that still resemble oars, which have come in handy when the Johnson failed to run.
We got this boat from Danny Cadman 25 or so years ago. It was apparently a derelict item found on the beach and was one of the first fiberglass models, which means it is very heavy and stable enough for both of us with two dogs, crab pots, and loads of found items.
We keep it at the marina, and over the past few years have neglected to haul it out and clean the bottom. We should do this at least every five years, whether it needs it … or not. The last time we started the motor and took it out, a suspicious trail of marine debris seemed to follow our very slow movement through the harbor, even at full throttle.
In 1841, Lt. Charles Wilkes was tasked by Congress to map Puget Sound and surrounding areas. His map of Vashon was quite clear. As an exercise, we decided to follow his soundings of inner Quartermaster Harbor by using a lead line to see if the bottom had changed much since 1841.
Judd Creek had spewed much bottom material onto the bottom of the harbor, which our soundings reflected as an 18-inch decrease in depth near Burton. Otherwise, the depth of the harbor has remained about the same since 1841.
The Crabber has had many adventures over several decades. Seán and I ran the rapids of the Raab’s Lagoon outfall more than a few times. The Crabber has participated in various “rescue” operations.
Once our boating friend, Craig, found himself in his Coronado sailboat tight against a rock reef near Raab’s Lagoon. It was a result of a bad ignition coil and the tides. We geared up and set out to save him. It was a sunny, windless day. Actually, he had suffered the misfortune of not merely engine trouble and desultory navigation … but had run out of beer. A quick stop at Sandy’s Burton Store solved the beer problem, and we gathered some sturdy lines and set out to rescue our intrepid mariner from a rock that was later marked on our charts as “Craig’s Reef.”
Arriving at the scene of the tragedy, we assembled our lines and very … very … slowly towed the boat back to the marina. The slowness caused by the excessive marine undergrowth on the bottom of both The Crabber and the Coronado was nature’s warning sign of “deferred” maintenance.
Shortly after that incident, we hauled both boats out and cleaned the marine life from the hulls. Our local resident marine biologist, Bill, was somewhat amazed by the generous variety of accumulated species, some of which he claimed to have never seen in the inner harbor.
The Crabber eventually towed many other potential maritime derelicts back from typical misfortunes, including our old wooden sailboat that lost engine control cables at Dockton one year …
Seán and I used The Crabber for actual crabbing for many years. In the good years, we had so much crab that we gave them away. We had so many crab that neighbors would lock their doors, as they often did in zucchini season. Lately, crabbing has been poor, but we still have our secret crab spot which is not far from the lost lake rock and the pink house. But we won’t tell you where it is. If we told you, it would not be secret anymore.
