The 18th of the first

Minding the Roots at Tavern Creek - 18

CRAB, CRABS, BACK FIN, BLUE CRAB.....DELICACY!

OK, I haven't even finished my first Pikes Place cup of caffeine and I am thinking of something to eat.  Something I haven't had in a long while.  At this hour of the morning why do I think of steamed crabs.  Lord knows and he ain't talking, but that's where I'm at.  

We used to take the little wooden boat and search the flats around the mouth of the Tavern or take a half hour ride south to the flats at Eastern Neck Island on the mouth of the Chester River.  Two ideal spots to wade the shallow with a dip net.  We'd tie a bushel basket to our waist and put it in an old inner tube and drag this arrangement around to hold the crusty crustaceans that were unlucky enough to succumb to our efforts.

All we had to do was to jump of the boat and wade with the dip net just grazing the sandy bottom of the bay and disturb the crabs hiding in the grasses.  What fun.  Bare feet would encounter all sorts of debris which could cut normal feet.  But ours of course were well callused by normal daily use.  We would remove our shoes as soon as it got warm in the spring and not put them on till we got new ones for school in the fall.  

Often when a hard crab (that's what we called them) would get up and run before us, it would be holding on to a buster (a crab losing its shell which they do in order to grow a new one) or a soft crab (one that has lost it's shell).  Buster and soft crabs were premium crabs to us.  Both made great bait used to fish for the wonderful strippers and other fish we caught.  Soft shell were a dining delicacy tho.

For us, and we were kids, the wholesale pricing of the crabs was the important part.  Soft shell crabs commanded the highest price at the market, busters next and finally hard crabs.  No we had no license the the fish house just looked the other way when we showed up looking like starving little urchins trying to feed our families.  But that was the way it was growing up.  A bushel of crabs could grub stake us for a week.  What fun!