I was fortunate today by getting to take a 4 hour demonstration ride on the F/V Aleutian Ballad.
If you watched season 2 of the Discovery Channel show, The Deadliest Catch, a few years ago, about King crab fishing in the Bering Sea of Alaska, you saw it as one of the boats featured. It has since been converted to a sight-seeing and demonstration boat that caters to the tourists that visit Alaska aboard cruise liners. The owner and some of the crew are local to my area. Also on board were the owners of the F/V Maverick from the same show, also local people. My father-in-law is an ex-fisherman and has a historical fishing web site, so we went for a ride, and it was also to benefit a local cause.
This is the F/V Aleutian Ballad: The F/V Aleutian Ballad bids farewell to commerical Fishing | Deadliest Reports
The boat was in my hometown of Astoria, Oregon this week and offering rides as a benefit for the local commercial fisherman’s association. My wife’s father bought us tickets and we left dock about 11:00am today for a little ride down river to where it meets the Pacific. The Columbia River is about 5 miles wide here near the mouth and salt water floods in several miles up the river. Although there are no King crabs here there are Dungeness crabs, which I think are even tastier.
This is a Dungeness crab: Dungeness crab - Wikipedia
The boat had set out one King crab pot and 20 Dungeness crab pots on yesterday’s demonstration run. So we sat in our chairs and admired the view and listened to stories told as they picked up the pots. There were about 40 in the King crab pot and each Dungeness pot had about a dozen. They let the visitors, some of them children, help measure and sort the crab. The keepers were put in salt water display tanks. The water on the river was like glass and it did not rain, which it had been doing a lot yesterday. Beautiful day!
Now the boat can’t keep the crabs and sell them because the commercial crab season for Dungeness doesn’t open until about Dec. 15th, but anyone with a sport shell fish license can keep them. So they divided the crab up among persons who had a shell fish license, I always get one so I can dig razor clams, (license cost per year: $6.50).
So not only did I have an excellent time, I walked off the boat with 6 live Dungeness crabs about 8 inches wide. Who I just cooked and are now chilling in my sink for a feast tomorrow. And probably freezing some crab meat for another day too. I hate to think what these crab would cost in the rest of the country.
I like them best just out of the shell.
Seafood lovers, do you have a favorite crab reciepe?