Success!

 Great day out on the water this morning!

First, caught a ginormous parrot fish.  This feeds on the coral and cleans it, so after a quick photo and swift removal of hook (me and my trusty pliers) we got it back in the sea and on its way.

Then we went and checked the crab traps and caught this ginormous stone crab!  Same as the fish: swift removal of ONE claw and back in the ocean asap.

Crab traps are in the water!!

Following on from my last post about the crab traps, I can now confirm we have five in the water!  

It was not without a lot of effort to get them to this point.  Assembling the traps together, was nothing compared to making the concrete bases for them.  You can kind of see the concrete in this photo?  Fair play to Garret and Patrick getting this done while Katrina and I were at work!

Then, they brought these, now very HEAVY, traps out to the mooring spot via jeep and out little 12 ft Carolina skiff.  They were dropped down with rope and a buoy for identification attached.  I etched our licence number into the buoys and spray painted them (again for easy identification). Oh! And not forgetting the bait of pigs feet and hot dogs.  Crabs like pork apparently??

By law the traps must now stay down for two weeks before you can pull them up and check them.  Hopefully there will be some crabs in there at this point - and you can remove one claw and throw the crab back in the ocean.  The crab will regrow it's claw.  How crazy is that???! You must however leave one claw on it - even thought it would regenerate the two in time - it needs one for protection and survival in the ocean.