I will be in the Dumfries area for a couple of weeks with my family and was hoping to take my boys crabbing(catch and release), any particularly good spots?

Iceland?

I wouldn’t want to annoy Peter Andre!

The Dumfries and Galloway Sexual Health Clinic?

You might catch crabs and see some particulary good spots.

Just to clarify, I am looking for crabbing spots on the Solway coast, rather than Dumfries town centre.

Sandyhills beach, not sure what the crab population is like but it’s a great beach. Watch out for the extremely sticky mud.

Sandyhills is lovely, but crabbing is more a pier or pontoon activity.

maybe more dogging than crabbing around there….. 🙂

You’ll need a harbour for crabbing ideally, and you’ll need to head west to Kirkudbright, Isle of Whithorn or Portwilliam. If you’re into fishing proper the coast is great, but the best marks are hard to reach with kids. Portwilliam was a favourite as I often took the kids to catch mackerel, Pollack and doggies off the harbour wall there. Good crabbing for littl’uns, but it’s a good hour and a half from Dumfries.

Probably, at six and two my boys are a little young for that, maybe next year.

^^^^ 🙂

Kirkudbright is a good shout, nice fish and chips as I remember. No fishing yet, an hour of crabbing is enough to keep them happy.

maybe more dogging than crabbing around there…..

You’d need to know how to behave around dogging. Are you a dogging person?

^^^^ do you ? I dunno, so will take your word for it, but I used to have a cat.. 🙂

It’s usually ok, as long as you say hello first!

could you do rock pool crabbing

– need tide out but lifting rocks, moving seaweed checking in tide pools etc -you can see a myriad of things if you’re lucky

They tend not to take the bait in my experience, but turning over rocks and looking for them is still fun.

Kirkcudbright resident here.

The harbour in the town is good for crab fishing but you want to make sure the tide is on it’s way in, the best bait is a whole/partial fish tied onto strong line and dropped over the wall, leave for a few minutes and the crabs will grab onto it, head down to the fish factory on dee walk and ask for fish scraps for crab fishing. We used to have a crab fishing competition every year with the winner being the person who caught the largest crab but that’s not allowed anymore, health & safety/animal protection gone mad 😉

An alternative would be to head down to Carrick shore and explore the many rock pools where you will find crabs, shrimps, small fish etc as well as sandy beaches and good rocks for climbing about on, follow that up with a visit to Cream of Galloway for an ice cream or pop into my old workplace for kids chocolate making workshops at The Cocoa Bean Co at Twynholm.

I remember Ross bay being the shizzle for crab hunting. Everything from common crabs to mahoosive spider crabs.

Area around the lifeboat station at Kirkcudbright (possibly no longer a lifeboat station)

Thanks all, sounds good!