Food & Drink

I Went Crabbing and Got Outplayed by All the Crabs

Spoiler alert: the trip was not a rousing success

By Kirsten Abel August 18, 2015

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My first mistake was forgetting to take the tag off my ring trap.

I laid everything out at the end of the Shilshole Bay Marina pier—my rope still taped into a coil, my harness and caliper both still in the packaging, a pound of raw turkey legs, and my ring trap (a contraption made of netting and two metal rings that, hypothetically, scoops up the crabs once they take the bait) with its tag fluttering in the salty wind. A man approached within seconds, pointed, and laughed. It wasn’t exactly the start to a crabbing version of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.”

I’m not sure why I wanted to go crabbing so badly. I love eating crab, but besides one fishing trip when I was about five years old that I can barely remember, I’ve never attempted to hunt for or catch my own food.

I planned for a couple weeks and asked my Uncle John–who is practically a professional crabber–if he could give me some advice. Then I headed to Seattle Marine & Fishing Supply to get my equipment. One of the staff members drew a diagram on the back of a receipt to show me how a ring trap worked. I think he picked up on my cluelessness when I asked if I needed “a crab measurer thing.” He explained the whole system to me in person pretty well, but I took his drawing with me to the pier just in case.

On the way to the beach, my boyfriend, who came along to help, asked where we were going. “That’s on the Puget Sound right?” he asked, semi-joking. “That’s not on a lake?”

“I know crabs don’t live in lakes,” I said, with enough sass to overcompensate for my lack of knowledge on basically everything else to do with the subject.

Once I had attached the harness, rope (with help from Google), and turkey leg (it seems that crabs will eat almost anything) to the ring trap, it was time to get the whole thing into the water. I held a wad of rope in one hand, wrestled the trap between my other hand and hip, and succeeded in sort of sliding it over the edge of the railing. It splashed heavily into the water and landed directly on top of someone else’s already set crab trap. This is apparently a terrible thing to do in the crabbing world. Time to pull it back up again.

On the second attempt, the man that had laughed at me for being such an obvious newbie came to my rescue. He and another woman in his group, both of whom didn’t speak much English, proceeded to bestow their crabbing wisdom upon me as best as they could.

Tie the rope to the railing before tossing the trap overboard. Ditch the timidity. Use some muscle when throwing the trap. Hold it like a giant frisbee. The woman, who was about as tall as me (I tell people I’m five-feet), chucked the trap into the Sound like a giant frisbee-throwing master. It flew at least 25 feet and then sunk perfectly to the bottom.

The rest of the afternoon was broken into 15-minute increments. Thirteen of those minutes were spent staring listlessly out at the Sound or down at the smooth notches worn into the pier’s railing by the ropes. The other two minutes were spent yanking the trap up (and in my case usually untangling it) and then pitching it back out again. Each time the trap rose and fell holding only the pale white turkey leg. 

After awhile we left the trap and went for ice cream at a little diner near the marina. We returned, and still nothing. Then we moved the trap to a shallower portion of the pier in order to see if anything was even coming near it. Several fish criss-crossed over the trap, but nothing crab-shaped approached. 

A few minutes (it felt like an hour) later, I noticed a dark patch to one side of the trap. I thought maybe it had claws, and that it might be moving. It had to be a crab, and a pretty big one. We heaved up the trap. 

It turned out to be a pretty big clump of seaweed. The turkey leg remained intact. Finally, as I began to wonder if crabs even existed in this part of the Puget Sound, we pulled up two red rock crabs. One was about the size of a tennis ball, much too small to keep. The other was close, maybe five or six inches across (six and a quarter is the minimum).

As I removed the caliper from its wrapping to use it for the first time, I experienced a series of mixed emotions. Part of me was ecstatic at having caught anything at all. The realization that the dark spot in the net was, in fact, the thing I’d been chasing all afternoon and not just a pile of vegetation was much more exhilarating that I thought it would be. I may have even let out a small whoop. But another part of me felt deeply anxious and I hoped the crab would be too small to take home. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be the decision-maker in this process, the one who had to make the call to keep, kill, and eat this crab.

At one point in the afternoon, the man who had laughed at and then generously helped me, pulled up one of his traps that had a small crab caught inside. He didn’t throw the crab back over the railing. Instead, he simply untangled it and allowed it to crawl out on its own. I watched as the crab sidestepped slowly away from the man, making little clicking sounds against the wooden floor of the pier. It shuffled to the edge, dove right off, and dropped 20 feet or so back into the water, returning home and endearing itself to me completely in one tiny splash.

When I measured my caught crab, it turned out to be about a half-inch too small. The whole time we were there, I didn’t see anyone catch anything big enough to keep. Either due to some grave errors in process (entirely likely on my part) or due to a wily streak affecting all large crustaceans, the crabs won handily that day.

 

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