I grew up crabbing the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and their estuaries.
Kept wet and shaded, the Blue Claw Crabs will live for hours. You need to move them to ice temporarily or permanently after a few hours. Dead crabs go limp. You’ll know them quickly; you’ll discard them. Healthy ones stay for hours in bushels… and are often transported a hundred miles inland and sold live. It’s common to buy live, road-side Blue Claws 100 miles in-land in summer.
That speaks to their durability. Some won’t make it. You toss them.
For pros, their crabs are kept in pots, and they harvest the pots/crabs, but in bushels, moist and shaded, you have hours to go.
For really long durations, you drop the crabs you caught back into the water, in buckets, lidded with holes drilled in it. Now you can burn 12 hours without concern, then you haul them in and have several more hours out of water before they’re dead.
You can freeze crabs if time is running out and you opt to not cook them.
40+ years of crabbing with trot lines, pots, boats, piers, etc. (Heck, I’m 48. Been crabbing since I was 4… so I’ve been crabbing… too long!)
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