Early this morning we drove to Fairwinds Marina on Chesapeake Bay to fish for blue crabs. It was amazing! So, so fun.
We arrived nice and early and were out on the water with Captain Frank around 6:30 am. Captain Frank had baited the 600 foot trotline yesterday by filling mesh bags tied every 10 feet with three live clams per bag. This morning we set up the baited line between two buoys and waited.
After setting up two lines, we then pulled them up to check if there were any crabs hanging on to the mesh bags trying to eat the clams. This is called fishing on a trot line. We took turns trying to net the crabs as Captain Frank drove the boat slowly down the line. This wasn’t actually too hard and ended up being really fun.
Oh boy! Did we ever catch a lot of crabs!
We measured them; they have to be five and a quarter inches to keep. We tossed back all the small ones and all the females, just keeping the large males. We ended up with a wonderful blue crab haul.
Ian helped the machine pull in the lines and then we were done! What an exciting ocean adventure.
Back at the campground, we relaxed at the pool after lunch. The weather today was perfect. It was warm but not hot, sunny with a few puffy clouds and a refreshing breeze.
We finally got down to steaming up our crabs. We used a huge pot on our propane stove top and added beer, white vinegar, Old Bay seasoning and water to the pot. We then steamed the crabs for 25 minutes. Getting the crabs from the cooler to the pot was a bit chaotic. Apparently the crabs are supposed to “sleep” when they are stored on ice but, to our immense surprise, our crabs “woke up” when they were being carried in the bowl and were only about halfway to the pot. We had a bit of a crab frenzy when several crabs scampered out of the bowl (pinchers blazing) and motored across the trailer floor. There was much shrieking and prancing on our part trying to get our toes out of the way of their claws but we managed to get everyone into the pot eventually.
Then it was feasting time. Everyone cleaned the crabs and ate their fill of the sweet meat. Ian and I cleaned the remaining crabs once everyone was full. This was a job we won’t soon forget. I have never seen so many crabs, let alone cooked and cleaned so many of them - it felt never ending. We now have a large Ziplock bag full of crab meat! I think crab cakes are in our future.
Once everything was all cleaned up, we finished up the evening around Grandma Cora’s fire pit with roasted marshmallows.
This has most certainly been a really great day to remember.
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