Two-for-One Crabbing
The big crabs were coming fast, furious and two at a time. My buddy, Mike Fiore, was in the bow holding a crab net crammed full of doublers. He was finding so many of the big males cradling females and clinging to the concrete bridge columns just below the water’s surface that he hadn’t time to shake one set out of the net before we were onto the next.
“This is unbelievable,” he whooped in excitement. “I’ve never seen so many doublers.”
Nor had I, and the fact that we hadn’t intended to go crabbing that morning made it more all the better.
We didn’t have a basket on board to store the crabs, so Mike was simply dropping them onto the deck. There was soon scarcely room to move about in the skiff, with crabs two deep and scuttling in search of a return to the water.
We had that net only because we intended to catch some big white perch. A crab net is the ideal landing device to ensure that a big heavy black back won’t be lost while over the side of the boat.
The perch outing was a bust. Despite an early arrival, by mid-morning we had virtually nothing to show. The fish were not there, though we worked the likeliest areas with our best spinner baits.
We exhausted Plan A and went into Plan B areas with no improvement. With a couple of peeler crabs and some bloodworms for a deeper-water Plan C, we headed for a not-too-distant bridge.
As I eased my skiff up to a piling so that Mike could drop his top-and-bottom rig on the down-current side where we hoped some jumbo perch would be laying up (they weren’t), he blurted out, “Man there’s a couple of really big doublers hanging onto this column.”
The baited top-and-bottom rig he had prepared never got wet as he laid down his outfit and wielded our perch landing device (the crab net) to bring the big jimmy and its date on board. Shaking them onto the deck, he leaned out and netted a second, then a third.
“Dang, look, they’re all over the place,” he observed.
The crabs kept coming.
A successful angler can adapt to changing conditions. The conditions that day had changed drastically. We went from angling for white perch to harvesting blue crabs.
I maneuvered our light craft close around each bridge support in turn, and Mike scooped up the doublers. After about an hour of working just a portion of the pilings, we had an astonishing number of crabs crawling the deck.
Creating a couple of makeshift measuring devices marked at 5½ inches to ensure we didn’t keep any undersized crabs, we culled through the lot. Pitching the females plus all of the males even close to undersized, we still ended up with nearly a bushel of nice jimmies.
Temporarily holding the keepers in our fish box while culling, we were then faced with another problem. A cooler is a poor place to store crabs as there is no air circulation. We had no other container and were almost an hour from home, so we dumped the keepers back onto the deck and began the run to the boat ramp.
During the trip back, as I moved my flip-flop clad foot to discourage a big jimmy that was seeking shelter in my shadow, the motion was enough to trigger a typical crab response. It latched onto my big toe.
With tears of pain and laughter running down my cheek, I held my foot still and the boat up on plane until the beast got bored and released my aching digit. The delicious crab feast we held that night was more than enough payback.