Crab Day
My coworker Ian hosts Crab Day every year. It’s an entire day of catching crabs and eating them. Four others and us gathered at the Shilshoe South Pier for the crabbing portion. Later, 23 people will show up at the nearby Golden Garden Park to feast on our morning catch.
For bait, we brought cans of cat food leftover from previous shrimping trip and razor clam leftover from our last clam digging trip. The smell of cat food brought back memories of that miserable journey in pursue of spot shrimps. The flashback made me really appreciate the sunny day we had to be out about on the pier.
Mike caught the first 2 crabs. Both crabs cling tightly to a piece of seaweed. They were too small to keep. Took Mike a while to loosen their tight grip in order to throw them back to the sea.
Ian pulled up another pot. In there was a much bigger bright red rock crab. We were able to keep that one. Unlike the Dungeness crabs, we are allowed to keep both male and female rock crabs if they are larger than the legal size.
Later on we caught several more rock crabs but none of them were big enough to keep. Other people on the pier had some luck catching Dungeness crabs. We however were strictly rock crabs.
We left around 1:45pm to go to our weekly puppy visit. I wonder if the others had better luck catching more crabs. 23 people sharing 1 crab is hardly a feast. 