Crabbin’ Time

In addition to talking about tomatoes and squash, people on the Eastern Shore are always asking how the crabs are. The Chesapeake blue crab is universally known and sought after this time of year both locally and from afar. Currently crabs cost approximately $130.00 a bushel, off the boat. Both gas and bait are costing the waterman a significant amount to chase a harvest which appears to be stellar this year, according to local watermen.

In case you folks who did not grow up on or near the Chesapeake Bay are curious, the life of a crab is quite interesting; as explained in William Warner’s 1976 Pulitzer prize winning Beautiful Swimmers.  This book, which  has never gone out of print, is a great read about the body of water that still produces more hard crabs than any other  in the world, the Chesapeake Bay.  Warner explains how the crab lives and how the watermen who catch these delicious crustations live and work.

The life of a Maryland crab begins in the Lower Bay where female or “sponge” crabs deposit their eggs between the first of June and the

Cooked soft shell crabs. Photo by Yunhee Kim

end of August. The baby crabs, which at birth are about 1/25 of an inch long, appear very unlike the mature crab;  looking more like a swimming question mark with seven pairs of legs and a long tail. This “zoea” sheds its shell several times, until it begins to resemble the adult, and is then called a “megalops.”  Typically, crabs hatch from the egg in late June, pass through the larvae stage by August, and start to move up the Bay during early fall, or until the cold weather halts their migration. In the spring their journey is resumed and full maturity is reached when the crab is 12 to 14 months old. In order to increase its size, the crab must molt or shed its outer skeleton. As it approaches a molt it becomes first a “peeler” and once the old  shell is shed, it is called a “soft” crab. It is then velvety in texture and roughly a third  again as large as the discarded shell. During the struggle for existence, crabs frequently loose legs and claws. Within a week of such a loss, a new appendage begins to form, but it takes at least two moltings to fully restore the limb.

It seems most appropriate to conclude this with a poem one of the Chesapeake Bay’s early literary voices, Gilbert Byron:

CRAB TALK

Momma sent me
To get the crabs
From old Benny,
Down on the creek
Where the shanty men seek
Happiness.

He was mending eel pots,
Tar and twine,
and deft seine needle;
Chewing tobacco
Spitting fine,
Whistling softly.

He couldn’t even see,
Little boys like me

I heard them scratching
In a covered basket
Shyly I whispered
Scared almost dead,
“Are those the crabs, Captain Ben?”
Rolling an eye, he grunted,
“Thems them,”
That’s all he said,
“Thems, them.”

Gilbert Byron

Well, we all know it is crabbin time
Now for some crab pickin’ and a cold one.

//essay-writ.org”;.