Some friends and I took the zodiac out yesterday and set our crab traps. Not a very good opening day, but we did get two keepers including one very large dungeness crab. They had to go to a meeting, so I took the crabs home and cooked them and then went out to check the traps again. Damnable crustaceans were all undersized and/or female. Oh well. I set the traps again a couple of miles down the shore. We’ll have to go out and check them today sometime.
So dinner last night was fresh dungeness crab (Pard’s SO said it was the best she’d ever had) and massive hunks of bovid musculature treated with fire. Lots of deadcow and half a dungie still in the fridge. Mmmmm.
Got four today. Almost got a ticket as well! I didn’t know you had to fill out the catch record when you catch the crabs. I was going to fill it out after I got the boat out of the water. While the game warden went to check someone else’s catch, I filled out the record after I secured the boat to the trailer (but before I hauled it up). I pulled the boat up behind the other guy, and the warden got back in his truck. I went up and presented the record and he warned me that I had to fill out the record when I hauled up the pots. He said he was giving the other guy a ticket for not filling his record out, but he let me go without taking any information. Just glanced at my form. Now I know.
The crabs have been in the cooler for about three hours now. I’m worried they’ll use up all of the oxygen in the water, but it can’t be helped. I’ve been trying to aerate the water with a big spatula thing with holes in it. Friends can’t get here for another two an a half hours at the earliest. If the crabs look sluggish, I can always walk down the street and get fresh saltwater.
I use to crab on the shore of Galveston bay with a string, a slab of bacon, and a cooler full of ice.
It’s a little bit harder to crab where I am now, tho
‘Fresh wound’? Luxury! When I was a lad we had to let the wound fester for a week before we could go crabbing! And we were happy to do!
Anyway…
Last night I ate one crab. Pard Jerry had 1½, plus some of his SO’s. That left half a crab leftover. As I said in the OP the three of us ate steak with our crab Wednesday, so we were pretty full. We had half a crab leftover from that meal. So I have two halves in the fridge that need to be eaten! I could just take the meat out, reheat it, and eat it with butter; but that seems a little mundane. When I was a kid, I used to like to get crab crépes from The Crépe Shop in PB. That was good, but I don’t know how to make those little pancakes. Nor the filling, for that matter. Crab cakes? Out of ‘one’ crab? Seems like a lot of effort for a small amount. Besides, I don’t know how to make crab cakes.
Last night I said that crabs were magical creatures. I mean, you just put a trap in the water with a little bait, and when you come back you have fresh seafood. Cool.
My friends may have been a little skeeved out because I killed and cleaned the crabs before cooking them. They’d never seen it done, nor heard of anyone else doing it. But that’s the only way I could get the crabs into my cooking pots.
BTW: I lost five pounds. Wednesday morning I had a ‘homestyle burrito’ ('jo-jo’s – potato wedges – sausage, egg and gravy) from the gas station. Didn’t eat again until the crab’n’cow in the evening. The zodiac is a flat-bottomed boat and you tend to get pounded in the ocean, what with swells, chops and wakes. Between maintaining my position in the boat and steering the 25 hp. Merc with the tiller, I guess I got a little work-out. I should go crabbing every day!
I have the remedy for getting rid of a personal in festation of crabs.
It involves shaving a small portion of your pubes and a couple of bricks.
Oh well I just will have to wait for some other time.
I miss it. We don’t get it out here in the desert 
