I used to be addicted to eating crab. But, it costs too much right now, so I have to settle for watching half-crazy guys risk life and limb (and a fair number of ribs) to catch crabs.
When a full pot comes up over the rail, several guys converge on it to cull out the crabs that are either female or too small. The keepers get counted up and poured into the holding tanks.
The way the show is edited, it looks like they do all this in about 45 seconds. For all I know, maybe that’s not much of an exaggeration, and in real live, they have only two minutes per pot. How do they count several hundred crab accurately when there’s legs and claws flying all around and several people are working on them? Some of these guys, frankly, don’t look like they could count to 21 unless they’re naked.
So, how do they manage to get a reasonably accurate count? Anyone know if there’s some point at which someone says “Ah, that bin’s full to the top, so there should be 100 crab in there.” or are they really counting up all the legs and dividing by eight?
And for good measure… Whoever puts together the “Coming up on the next Deadliest Catch…” promo spots needs to be smacked up the head for making us worry about the Cornelia Marie. All week, we were hearing “Coast Guard helicopter, Cornelia Marie, over” and wondering what sort of grave peril they were in. Turns out he just wanted a weather report!
They spend a while sorting and counting crab. They’ve got to toss the shorts back, so pretty much every crab is handled. Each guy at the table keeps his own count, and gives it to the deck boss, who reports the total to the captain. While this is going on, the captain is circling back to drop the pot in the same place while it’s being prepped & baited, or it’s being tied up on deck if they’re moving the pots. This all takes a while that you don’t see on TV - they sometimes talk about 10 hours to run a 50 pot string, giving 12 minutes/pot.
The count they keep on the boat is of number of crab. Presumably they have some average crab weight they use to figure out how much crab they have while at sea - since the catch quotas are by weight, not number. When they offload the crab, they just pretty much hope they got the weight right - I remember once when Blake was captaining the Maverick, he came up 10,000 lb short of what he thought he had in the tanks.
They’ve been doing that all season, and it’s especially pathetic because if anything serious really did happen to any of them, you could google it. It would also probably make it into the national news cycle too. During the teaser at the beginning of king crab, they spliced together bits of Keith talking with his wife about his biopsy, the Wizard’s mechanical trouble at the beginning of opilio, and the press conference about the Katmai to make it sound like the Wizard sank.
The crab pots are dumped onto a sorting table. If you notice sometimes the guys will use a little hand held stick with an opening to measure a legal crab. Usually they can tell just by looking, but if it’s close they pass it through the measuring stick. Also, females must go back, you can tell the females because the flap on the underbody is wider.
You see a pot full of crabs dumped on the sorting table and some are pushed down one shute that goes back to the ocean and the keepers go down into the holding tank.
They do not try to count all the crabs in the pot, they count the keepers. And the avearge weight of the keepers is used to determine how much has been caught.
You can sometimes see them pull up a half full pot and count only 12 crab back to the captain.
Am I the only one who wonders how many “non-keepers” are getting eaten on those boats?
I remember as a kid, my family took a vacation up the coast. We did some deep-sea fishing and some crab fishing off a dock in Coos Bay, Oregon. While sorting the keepers from the non-keepers, one of the little ones pinched the shit out of my dad’s finger. “Thats it for you!” (something like that, I never thought I would forget the exact words, yet I have ), he yelled, and kept that little bastard and made sure he kept it seperate and ate it himself.
Or maybe if you deckhand on the Time Bandit, the last F-ing thing you want to eat is crab.
There’s a blog on the discovery website from one of the cameramen, where he says they never eat the crab on the boat, because the crab you eat counts against your quota, and the paperwork to remove 10lb of crab from the tanks is too much hassle. Getting caught with crab or crab parts in your kitchen without the paperwork being filled out can result in big fines. Same thing with too many short crabs - big fines. It’s probably not worth it to keep a lookout for CG boats while you’re cooking & eating crab so you can quickly toss your dinner into the sea before the Coasties board you.
It seems clear that the experienced captains can tell roughly how many crab there should be. How full the pot is times how much is being thrown back. They complain sometimes if they think the count is far off, if someone isn’t counting right.
), he yelled, and kept that little bastard and made sure he kept it seperate and ate it himself.