When my my friend Shaun invited me to go crabbing for the first time, I jumped at the opportunity. I love crabmeat; who wouldn't love catching the little buggers? It wasn't of course until after I said "yes" that she told me I'd need to meet up with them at 6am that I hesitated. "Aaaallllright. I'll be there." I don't think I even went to bed that Friday night, just dozed on the couch until Shaun called around 5am. Quick brush of the teeth, wash of the face, and change of the clothes, and I was out the door.
I met Shaun, Curtis, and the kids down by the Spillway at some kind of nature park thing the schools sometimes bring the kids to. This was early June, and by 6am, it was already at 85% humidity and the day was just warming up. The heat index reached 110 that day, if I recall. Shaun's kids are already pros at this-at 8 and 13 years old! Here they are trying to teach clumsy, uncoordinated, accident-prone Miss Jackie how to crab.....it really is a shame there aren't pictures to go along w/this story.
We crabbed off this peninsula for, I don't know, maybe an hour and a half. We caught perhaps 4 crabs. The water was simply too shallow and as soon as you pulled the crab up, they saw you, realized the jig was up, and took off!
After a rather unsuccessful time, Curtis took us to someplace underneath the freeway off Hwy 51. Now, I'm not exceptionally keen on eating anything that's been exposed to chemicals and highway water runoff, so I was a bit concerned. Other people were there, though, and when I said something, Shaun's husband just laughed at me: crabs are bottom feeders anyway, so what should it matter if oil and petroleum products have passed through their lungs?
It wasn't until we got to this location that we started pulling in the crabs left and right! Seemed like every time we dropped a chicken neck down, a crab was taking off w/it! (Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you that part: you crab w/chicken necks tied to strings and slowly pull the crabs into waiting nets-kinda dirty, but a whole lotta fun!). We ended up catching 5 or 6 dozen total.
After cleaning up and resting (we were all exhausted from getting up so early and being out in the heat so long), Curtis got to boiling the crabs. Aside from being a complete pain to crack and eat, those crabs were the tastiest things I've ever eaten (mmmm....petroleum flavored crabmeat ----j/k)!
I've never had an experience like my first crabbing adventure. I've gone fishing plenty of times, but I simply pulled the fish from the water and dropped it into a bucket. When you've never done everything from start to finish, it's very surreal: to take a living creature out of its environment, cook it 6 hours later, and eat it shortly thereafter.....there's something primordial about it.
Wrapped up in the moment on the dock off Hwy 51, wanting to recognize the price that was being paid, I said a small "thanks" to Mr. Crab, the little pokey creature that gave it's life so that I might have tasty crabcakes.
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