In early 2009, you may recall our crabbing adventures. I used a dinghy with an electric motor to work a couple crab traps in Bay Point. It yielded half a dozen or more crabs every few days, and was probably a money-losing venture because we fed these crabs some very nice bait. Most times, it was barely enough for one or two little crab cakes. Cute.
We had found the occasional small blue while working our stone crab traps, so we knew they were around, but frankly we had poor luck trapping crabs. We (or I, at least) didn't think much of it until one particular day, when we were riding our bicycles around the mysterious trails of the Lower Keys in the late afternoon, when we came to a mud hole we were already familiar with, only to count nine blue crabs swimming around in it. That day was December 11, 2010. I whipped out the iPhone and shot this photo:
We vowed to come back the next day with a dip net and see if we could get down to business.
We bungee-corded the dip-net and a small strainer to our bicycles, and also brought tongs and gloves to help deal with errant crabs. We hopped on our bikes and got on our way, late in the afternoon of December 12, 2010. We barely got our feet wet, sticking mostly to the very edges of the salt marsh, reaching with the dip net to score nine medium-sized blue crabs:
Which we (Grace, mostly) picked into a small bowl thus:
Which made the most absolutely amazing blue crab pasta with some shrimp from Fanci Seafood nearby:
At this point, we were beginning to get excited. We'd found a natural food source, reachable without fossil fuels and requiring no bait (just our Florida saltwater fishing licenses). And we had the means to process and eat it. And it tasted really good. And nine crabs would have been considered a great catch back in the Bay Point trapping days. Nine crabs. Cute.
On December 19th, we re-deployed, again in the late afternoon. When we arrived at the salt marsh, we heard other people talking to each other and... what were they doing? Stomping around in the salt marsh. And they carried buckets as well as dip nets. They were very friendly, said they were just leaving, and wished us luck. After having very little luck netting at the periphery of the salt marsh, I realized what had to happen. In blue crabbing, as with life,
If you really want blue crabs badly enough, you will go out stomping and wading in the salt marsh.
I was wearing a very nice pair of boots that I'd hardly ever worn before, Columbia hiking boots from the Mast General Store near Boone, North Carolina. Timidly at first, I stomped through the mud, felt the cold water circulating inside my boot, and began to wander around the water. Not very far, as it turned out, but enough. Locating and landing these suckers had gotten noticeably easier.
That day, we came home with 14 blue crabs. And Grace was no longer content to remain out of the action. She was chomping at the bit, demanding that we get a dip net for her and bring her water shoes next time. Because we already took for granted that there would be a next time. Anyway, back to the 14 crabs,
We got em all home alive again, and they went great steamed with Old Bay again, and Grace worked several hard hours to make the most amazing soup I have ever tasted, a healthy Maryland Crab Soup (recipe here), which fed us for several days:
So the crab fishing was beginning to hit its stride, We were more confident in our ability to stomp through marshes and get to the crabs, and we were starting to use Google Maps to locate where our next stomping-and-wading grounds would be. I think they're here. No, look at these shallows here, right next to the thicker mangroves. We were getting into the game of feeding ourselves free protein, and we were awesome, and we had 14 crabs to prove it. Fourteen crabs. Cute.
We were scheduled to deploy on Christmas Day, but we couldn't wait. On December 24, we went out to the crabbing grounds with two dip nets. Grace wore her water shoes. As we were arriving, we passed some other folks who were just leaving. For the next few hours, we had the crabbing grounds to ourselves. We both stomped around the marshes, sometimes calling them out, "Medium bogey, 10-o-clock," and so forth. Sometimes we landed two or even three in the same net before dumping them into the aluminum strainer where we kept them covered with a damp towel. Grace pioneered entire new crabbing holes, stomping and wading farther out than ever before, finding more awesome marshes full of blue crabs. Come to the entrance, wade down Crab Alley and into Crab Bay. And of course, catch Crab Crab.
We had the time of our lives. And we caught 17 crabs. It was a glorious fiesta:
By this trip, we had begun to be much more selective, by which I mean we were no longer accepting female crabs, and we'd begun to not even accept smallish males. As patrons of the crabbing grounds, we had also become stewards of its conservation. Thus the count of 17 crabs, though not greatly increased in number from before, represented all medium males, with the occasional large'ish one, yielding most of a pound of picked crab meat.
As we began to bungee the gear back onto our bicycles for the trip home, other crabbing parties arrived and chatted with us. We left you plenty, good luck! And as we got home and settled into another evening of picking crabs and drinking Miller Lite, we made evermore grandiose plans for the next outing: Techniques, gear, locations.
The next morning, we noticed something else: Our bodies hurt. As it turns out, an afternoon of crabbing works every muscle in your body. By the next morning, all your joints are aching badly and your skin may be sun-damaged. It feels as though you'd played a full game of rugby the night before. Fortunately, it takes more than that to stop us. We re-deployed on January 1, and crabbed until sunset:
The New Years Day crabbing trip was, like all the others before it, incredibly fun. Grace once again waded out into new waters to discover richer crabbing grounds. We were more selective than ever before, this time catching two crabs that even a Marylander like Grace would call "large". We only took home 12 crabs, but they sure were 12 that counted, picking down to almost a pound of crab meat:
Here I am posing with my largest of the day. The photo may make him look small, but compare him to the size of my hand. That is a pretty good sized crab, and Oskar noticed:
Grace made the most amazing crab stuffed mushrooms. If you die without experiencing these, you have led a hollow existence:
By January 8, we were very ready to re-deploy. Grace with the dive-boots, me with the Columbia boots. Grace with a smaller dip net, me with a larger one. This time, we brought a bucket instead of the strainer, as capacity had begun to be an issue. We brought our gear out through the marsh to a centrally-located place in the mangroves, in order to avoid doubling back to deposit our catch. We jammed to Pandora and sang while catching crabs and drinking beer. It was the most incredible time ever, I landed an enormous crab, the kind we speak of in hushed tones as "granddad":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o_R6La1VP0
Grace, not to be outdone, also landed a granddad of her own:
No sooner had it begun, than it was over, maybe 90 minutes later. We were beginning to run out of capacity in our 5-gallon bucket! I didn't know how many crabs we had, but I knew it was a lot. The bucket was so heavy that I had to drag it through the water as we marched back to our bicycles, letting the buoyancy of the bucket assist me in hauling it. We pedaled very slowly and carefully home, as upsetting the bucket and losing this precious catch would surely be a fate worse than death.
Once we got them home and started cleaning them and placing them into the strainer to be steamed, we realized that for the first time ever, we'd caught so many that we'd have to cook them in multiple batches. Only once this was complete, did we get an accurate count:
Batch one, fourteen crabs.
Batch two, sixteen crabs. Thirty total. Thirty crabs in ninety minutes, including those two monsters we got. We were no longer just having fun and hoping to catch dinner. We had crabbing down to a science, after catching 82 crabs in 5 trips. Our 30 crabs picked down to a pound and a half of crab meat. The six crab cakes were fat enough to make any hamburger look small, and we still had half a pound of crab meat left for crab imperial the next day. By now, we'd also learned to cut the carcass in half horizontally (not vertically) when picking, allowing access to more chambers of meat at a faster rate.
Look at that claw! That's not a stone crab claw, buddy. That's from a blue. A blue crab claw of this size tastes so much sweeter than stone crab.
I will at this time graciously accept our crown. We are the kings of blue crab.
-Chris