The Better Part of Valor
Back when crabs weren’t an Endangered Species, I used to walk the eelgrass beds at minus tides sometimes as early as late March or early April. Barefoot, wearing shorts, but an Eskimo parka on top. My feet would go numb, but … those first Dungeness of the year were muy delicioso and worth a little frostbite. Every year the season started later and ended earlier, the price you pay for an overpopulated Puget Sound and too many commercial crabbing licenses. By the time the season starts now, 1st of July, the tribes and the commercial boyz have pretty much cleaned the bottom.
I’m not complaining, mind you, just stating the facts. I don’t make my living off seafood harvesting, but harvesting seafood does help me avoid seeking honest work by knocking down the grocery bills. Back when crabs were the size of pitbulls and plentiful as buffalo, I probably ate too many of the monster bottom feeders. Since they were top of their foodchain, I hate to imagine the toxins they managed to collect down there by the Everett Navy base and the paper mills. The shortened recreation crab season might just add a decade or so to my life.
If you walk for crab the way I always did, you’re at the mercy of the tides. Unless you scuba dive for the buggers…. So lately I’ve kept a dinghy down at the beach and drop pots like all my neighbors do. Course they got 10 horse motors on theirs and I got homemade oars. My row out is about 5 or 6 football fields, maybe a third of a mile one way, good exercise, a nice workout. In calm seas.
Last week my brother was here and the day before he left I wanted crab for his bon voyage dinner. The wind was blowing hard, but being the sons of a Navy father, we hopped in and rowed into the gale. Which promptly picked up to whitecaps. We were a bit overloaded, us and the boat, but by Neptune, we were going to eat crab that night! Half an hour into this my brother starts asking questions like what do we do in case of a capsize, swim for shore or stay with the boat? I didn’t tell him it’s every man for himself, but I could see he was weighing whether crabs were worth drowning for. On the South End they are. Where he’s from, hamburgers looked pretty good, which is what he suggested we consider.
I’m not the world’s most courageous sailor, but I’m right up there with the most foolhardy. My brother isn’t a coward — I don’t recall him ever being scared, except maybe drive-in horror movies we’d go to as kids — but we finally decided about 10 feet from the buoys that Mom and Dad didn’t need a double drowning at this stage in their dubious parenting career. Those hamburgers sounded pretty darn good. Even if we did have to drive to the store when we rowed back into shore. Just had to be careful lighting the barbecue.
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