Catch and Cook Snow Crabs & King Salmon - Fishing Alaska During a Winter Storm

Oh my goodness, a delicious fish. I love eating these. Wow, that is a pile of seafood. There you go. Thanks Dad. Alright, Luke here at the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel and today we're going on a fishing, crabbing date night. And my brother and his wife are coming along. It's a double date. And we're going to go catch king salmon and tanner crabs and cook them up and eat them. We're going to drive about four hours south to Homer and get a little room for the night. My oldest sister is watching our children so hopefully she'll be alive and healthy. Thank you Michelle and Andrew. So brave, so brave. Welcome to Homer. We're on the end of the Homer spit at the Land's End Hotel. We're going to check in for the night so we'll be nice and ready for an early charter in the morning. And we'll see you guys in the morning because we've got a fishing charter. See you then. Well good morning. Did you guys sleep well? Yeah. I'll tell you my favorite thing in the world about winter fishing charters is they don't leave the dock until like 9 o'clock. So we can actually have breakfast and sit down and eat breakfast. Right now the weather is really iffy. Noah says there's seven to eight foot waves out in the ocean right now. Which is, it's aggressive. How you doing? I'm Josh. Hi, I'm Becca. Good to meet you. Alright guys, we're here with Josh with Big Butt Charters and we're going for winter king. And yes, the name of the charter is Big Butt. Oh now, unfortunately the weather is a little bit nasty. I heard seven to eight foot waves out in the open. But the weather is kind of limiting our fishing spots. So we're going to try to make the best lemonade we can out of these lemons. But nothing else. We're going to go fishing in the middle of the winter, right? Yeah, we'll give it a shot. If you guys want to try this, I'm going to go ahead and put a link down in the video description below. So check that out. As some of you guys may or may not know, salmon are a strange fish. They're born in freshwater. And when they're just about like an inch long, they do this migration all the way out to the saltwater. And they spend most of their lives out in the ocean getting nice and fat. And when it comes time for them to spawn, they head back to the rivers where they were born. They go up there, they spawn, they lay their eggs and they drop dead. So if you want to catch salmon in the freshwater, you have to do it during the run when they're spawning. And you only have a couple week window to catch the salmon. However, out in the ocean, you can catch them as long as you can find them. And here in the wintertime, there are some kings that stay relatively close to shore that you can target in the dead of winter. And so it's one of the few fishing opportunities here in Alaska in the middle of wintertime, other than ice fishing. Welcome to Kachemak Bay. Oh, look, there's someone surf fishing. That dude's my hero right there. Doing good, babe? Yes. How are you doing? Well, we had about six foot waves out there, and that's a little bit too much to pull crab pots and do fishing. So we turned around and head up into Kachemak Bay to find some calmer water. And it looks like we might just find that. Well, this is pretty nice. I don't feel like I'm in an episode of Deadliest Catch here. How deep do you troll for the kings? Typically, it's like 45,000 feet. Oh, that's deep. Got some trolling herring pre-rigged up. You got a big flasher right there. It kind of tracks the fish. You hook your rig up to this cannonball, and that takes it down to the depth you want. When you hit a fish, it frees itself from this thing, and then you don't have to pull this big lead up when you're fighting the fish. You can see the rod's bent way over because it's attached to that cannonball. When a fish hits, it's going to pop up and start doing this number. Well, this is a lot nicer than this cove. I feel like we're fishing rather than trying to survive. With the weather being so nasty, we just couldn't go to the fishing spots we wanted to, so we had to kind of try some long shots, and it just didn't pan out. We're going to pull it up and head back to the harbor. Apparently, in the mouth of the bay, they had eight and a half foot waves, according to the buoy. I think it's really good we stayed back here in the back part. Well, we survived it. We made it back to the harbor. It is icy. You know it's cold when the salt water's freezing. I got to say, Josh was a good sport. He called and warned us that the weather was pretty awful, and we wanted to come. We had our babysitters lined up anyways. He was not wrong about the weather. We've got to come back and give this another go. I want to get some crabs and a winter king. All right, guys. It's another day. We're back in the car, and we're headed to Homer to go try winter kings again. You guys ready? Yeah! Hopefully, we'll catch some crabs, too. Who's going to catch the biggest crab? I am! Well, we made it to Homer, Alaska, but we're here a little early because we wanted to visit some friends. We're going to be visiting the Kilchers, and we're going to do a little play date with the kids. All right. We're here at the Kilcher homestead at Ivan's house, and it is an ice rink here. Let's get you to safety first, and then we'll worry about it. Is that ash? Yeah, it's woodstove ash. Yeah, it actually works really good. It works really good. It's what my grandpa used to do. All right, guys. We're here with Ivan and Eve Kilcher, and if you guys watch the Discovery Channel show, Alaska, The Last Frontier, you might recognize them, but they also have a pretty strong social media game on Instagram and Facebook, I think. So we'll put links in the video description below to that. We'll just kind of hang out and let the kids have a little play date here. And for all you people at home whose kids wish they were in our family, all of my kids wish they were in their family. So the grass is always greener. It's always greener. Yeah, you guys know. That is a hardcore treehouse right there. Hey there, buddy. Hey, they're not too bad at all. You got three kids and a cat on your roof. Oh, this is your crossroads? This is the crossroads. That thing has recoil. I was hoping I could drive one of these. There we go. Hey, we made it. That's a nice hill. We had a great time hanging out with the Kilters. That was a lot of fun. But we're here at the Land's End Hotel, and it's kind of late, so we're going to get these kids to bed, and I'll see you guys in the morning. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Everyone who's excited to go fishing, raise your hand. Hey, two out of three ain't bad. Good morning. All right, guys, we're going to give it a try. We're going to see if we can't catch some crab and king salmon, and the weather looks a lot better than last time we were here. Who thinks they're going to catch the biggest king salmon? How big is the crab you're going to catch? Something like that big? Got a crab pot that's been soaking for a little while. We're going to pull it up and check it. Put it through the pulley, and then you wrap it around there, and that pulls it up. Boil it on up. Watch out, you're in the bite. How far down is it? It is about 390 here. 390 feet deep. Yeah, so if you're wondering why you don't pull these by hand, here's your answer. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. Holy mackerel. Look at that. There are so many in here. This one's a female, so that one's going bad. That one's a female, yeah, because it's got the round bottom on it. You can tell the males here have the little V on them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, look at that. These might be too small. Look at all the lice. Sea lice on them. Oh, man. These are some good dummies. Yeah, I know. What do you guys think of that? Yeah, they picked those salmon carcasses clean. Nice one. Look at that. Isn't that crazy? Oh, he's trying to bite me. When you find a female, you can throw that one back. So this right here is a Dungeness crab, and you're not allowed to keep these, but this is a really nice one here. You want to just chuck them over? Yeah, sure. And this right here is a Tanner crab. Now, are these the same thing as snow crab? Yes. Snow crab are either tanners or opelio crab. Okay, gotcha. Most likely, if you get them in a store, they're opelio. There's just more of those around. The tanners are also known as bear die crab. Look at that. That is a beautiful crab. Nice male. Look at the size of that guy. Okay, another Dungeness. Three Dungeness I've put over. Now, he's undersized, and a female, so we'll let him go. A Dungeness? Oh, yeah, sure enough. Here we go. Here we go, bud. Here, Becca. Is that a male crab? 16. Here, just don't let him get your face. We're in the ocean. I'm going to throw it right over for her. How about this one? Oh, nice. Yeah, count. One, two, three. Yeah, about 30 keepers. We threw over about 15 or so undersized ones, and then we had about 12 Dungeness in there, so that was a nice one. Look at that chum slick coming up. Oh, yeah. Well, now that we have completely limited out on crab, let's go get some salmon, huh? We're off to a great start here. Hey, Tommy, what did you call the crabs with one claw? One pinch man. Excellent anime reference there, Tom. Tanner crabs in Alaska require a harvest ticket, which requires you to fill out a survey about the fish you catch or the crabs you catch. So we just caught our crabs, and now we've got to fill out our paperwork. All right, guys, we're getting ready to start fishing, and we can catch a whole bunch of different things, but this spot, we're kind of hoping for some rockfish, but we can pick up some salmon, and, I mean, lots of things can happen. It's the ocean. Oh, I just got another hit. Oh, there's a hit. There's a nice one. Can I? Yeah, sure. Here, hold. Oh, he's taking some drag. You might have a serious fish. Oh, he got off. He got off. We can see the hook. But we'll get another one, and we've already had two on in, like, a few seconds. There he is. That's good. Oh, look at that. A kelp greeling, right? Yep, yep. A pretty fish. I got the first fish of the day. First fish of the day. Look, it's a kelp greeling. You can eat them, but they're not generally a popular fish to eat, so we're going to put them back. Got a few hits, but we're not seeing the signals in action that we were hoping for, so we're going to go ahead and troll for some salmon and keep an eye out on the fish finder for big schools of rockfish. If we see some, we can stop and switch back to jigging. So these are the jigs we're using for rockfish, but for the salmon, troll bait is a little trolling herring. Thread it on with a little treble hook, and they have a flasher with a literal flasher inside. Tom, are you doing this? All right, get in here. The other one's going. Get that one. There we go. There's the salmon. There you go. There, I can see him. There he goes. There, we got him. A bigger salmon. That's a good one. It's a king salmon. High five, Tom. High five, Nate. Nice, good hit. Look at all the sea lice on him. See these? It's a little bug that sucks their blood. Well, there we go. We're off to a roaring start. Trolled for about five minutes, and boom, boom, got a double. This is about an average size king salmon. This one's a little small. I'm not sure what Jacob's up to, but he's under the table here. Oh, we got one. We got one. Real fast, real fast. Yeah, keep him bending that rod. He came off, he came off. Sorry, buddy. How you feeling, babe? A little off? I love you, my brave, supportive wife. We got a few rockfish signals here. We might try dropping down for some rockfish. Oh, I think I got one already. Yeah, look at that. Another beautiful kelp, really. What a pretty fish. By the way, those make excellent bait for lean cod. Nice black bass. A delicious fish. I love eating these guys. We got quite the smorgasbord going on. Don't let it come off. Oh, it's on! Yeah, a little kelp grilling. Bring it over here. Pretty thing. Yeah, look at that. Oh, look at this. Oh, look at that. Not a halibut, but a flounder. Look how pretty that is. We got another one. Look at that. Well, guys, we had some luck with the kings. We had some luck with some rockfish, but the waves are getting a little bit nasty and Becca's feeling a little seasick, so we're going to go up into the bay into a more sheltered spot and see if we can't do some fishing there and get Becca on some fish. Well, I got a bit of a cold wind kicking up, so it's kind of nice to be trolling and just hanging out in the cabin a little bit. Get out of that wind. I want to see if we can get Becca a king salmon here. If the fish gets on, just shove your children out of the way. Don't even hesitate. Throw Nathan to the side. All right, mom. Go get her. Go get it. Right one. That one. That one. Oh, it's moving. He's dripping. That's a nice one. Oh, yeah. You can take it out. Yes, Becca. Best fish of the day. Good job, Becca. You did it. What do you think, babe? Was that fun? That was fun. That was great. It's cold. All right, we got three kings in the boat. This is not bad at all. Well, we had a great trip and a good time, but the weather's getting crappy on us, so we're going to take those salmon and crabs and rockfish back to the harbor. We're going to clean them up. We're going to take them home. We're going to show you how to cook them. It's going to be awesome. Oh, that is a pile of seafood right there. Look at that. And this is a big mama. No attacking Jacob with the crab. The salt of the deadly crustacean. It's got the white meat instead of pink meat. Yeah, look at that. That is white meat. That's what they're normally like. This one's got white meat on them. Sometimes you even get them when they're kind of marbled. There we go. That is a lot of seafood. We are loaded. You just kind of break it over the side like this. Split right in half, and then you kind of got a little gunk in there, and then the lungs are in there. You just kind of get your fingers off, and you're good to go. Daddy, daddy, this one's me. He was pinching my boob. Alright, well thank you very much. That was such a good time. If you want to come here to Homer and do this too, check out Big Butt Charters. I'll put a link down in the video description below, and definitely check that out if you're in the area. Hey, thank you. Did you guys have a good time? Yeah! Yeah! Well, time to drive four hours back to Acreage and cook up some crabs and salmon. Alright guys, we're back at the house, and it's time to cook up some crabs and salmon. We've got a whole bunch of family coming over, so this is going to be pretty awesome. Alright? Hey, speaking of creatures... Well, there we go. That is a pile of crab legs. Let's get them in the hot water. Alright guys, here we go. Nothing fancy. When you've got good ingredients, you don't need complex recipes. We've got fresh Alaskan salmon, because this is the white salmon. It's kind of a funky color, but they taste just as delicious. Big pile of snow crabs. That's only half of it. The other half are still boiling over there. And some fruit and salad and rice pilaf. Gimme, gimme. Can I have some crab? And there's some garlic butter on the table. And there's more of the brown sugar sauce right there if you want. Right there on your pilaf. Have you ever taken aikido or any sort of jujitsu? Just kind of do an arm bar and then break the elbow. Pull it backwards. See, that's the ten you want to try to get as much of that as you can. Nope, no more crab bites. No more crab bites. Do you like the crab? You guys like it? Was the crab good? Salmon was good? There you go guys. A lovely, delicious mess. Hopefully you enjoyed watching this as much as we enjoyed eating it. If you guys want to see more videos from the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel, don't forget to click subscribe. We put out new videos every Saturday morning. Thanks for watching, guys. 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