Crabbing

When my parents bought the house in Washington they fulfilled their dream of moving to a quiet beautiful place. What they didn't realize was that they also fulfilled my dream of having access to a place where I could hunt Dungeness Crab. Now, I am not much of a hunter or fisherman, but I am a huge fan of food and Dungeness Crab rates pretty high on my list of great things to eat.

When we are in S.F. I often make a point of picking up fresh Dungeness Crab. The problem is that even in S.F., in season, they are quite expensive. So, I was really excited when my parents moved onto the water. I was even more excited when I found out that the cove their house overlooks is one of the premiere crabbing grounds in the Sound.

The other exciting thing was that the summer season started 7 am, July 4th, and the former owners of the house were nice enough to leave a crab trap in the rafters. So, on Thursday July 5th dad and I paddled a kayak out into the cove and dropped the trap loaded with chicken parts. Later that afternoon we went back out and picked up the trap.

When we pulled up the trap we had 7 or 8 decent sized crabs. We then had to go through the process of pulling out all of the illegal crabs and putting them back in the water. Which meant that we had to pull out all but one of them. We definitely are not experienced crabbers since we both were intimidated by the crabs and we had a very hard time pulling them out of the trap. (BTW, they were surprisingly fast and the male that we kept was feisty!)

In the end we cooked one crab and we did so without incurring any injuries. So, we proclaimed ourselves victors over the crabs...we may not be so lucky the next time.

Oh, and seeing the crabs seemed to make an impression on Ethan. We have a crab Beanie Baby in the house. A few days ago he led Kristina and I into the play room where he had placed the crab on a plate with a shoe and told us "Crab Eat Shoe!" It was clearly a joke. It is pretty amazing how early children learn how to clown around. Below is a picture of his setup: