A Crabby day

One of the things I loved doing as a kid was “crabbing”.  My family loved crabs and living right by the eastern seashore gave us the opportunity to have crabs on a regular basis.  We would just decide some random weekend that we wanted to have crabs.  Dad would get us big girls all excited and often we would take some cousins or others or whoever was available with us to crab at Virginia Beach.  The more the merrier for the more crabbers the more crabs! 

My father would bring along plenty of twine, nets, buckets and chicken legs.  Chicken legs back then were so cheap you cannot imagine.  So we would have plenty according to how many people came along.  We would head to the beach not too far from where we spent our time swimming and we would set up our little crabbing station.

Dad would cut of a length of twine according to your height, then he would tie a chicken leg to one end of it and make a loop on the other end so you could hold on to the twine, then you would be given a net.  We would each get this set up then set off to wade into the ocean into different directions up to our waists or arm pits but no need to go any higher.  We would drag that chicken let behind us slowly or sometimes stand still and just let it float along the bottom of the ocean floor (my preferred and most successful method).  You could see through the water, not perfectly clear but clearly enough to see when you had a crab chewing on your chicken leg.  Those crabs would clamp down strong enough that once they latched on they would hang on for dear life.  You could slowly bring them high enough toward the surface to slip the net we had brought along right under them.  We would then take the crab to shore and stick it in the bucket with its buddies and set out for more. 

Occasionally either you or one of the cousins would let out a yell of pain because one of the crabs had found one of your toes instead of the chicken legs.  That was quite painful and not one of my favorite parts of crabbing.  This actually happened rather often but they didn’t have the surf shoes they have now and we probably wouldn’t have worn them anyway we wouldn’t have had the money to have bought them to be truthful. 

After we filled the buckets to brimming we loaded the cars with crabs and people and headed back to the house.  Then began the crab boil.  In the back yard the crabs were cleaned and cooked by my dad in a huge pot outside.  We children hung around smelling and waiting for those crabs to be done, it seemed like it took an eternity to get those crabs done!  Finally the picnic table would be covered with newspapers and the crabs would be heaped up in the center on the table so hot steam would  be coming off of them.  Oh my goodness!  It was all I could do to use the manners my parents had so carefully instilled in me. 

The family would sit and crack and eat those crabs until every one of us were so filled, the funny stories of the day were told and we would sit back and relax.  Mom would bring the trash can over and rake all those newspapers off into the can and the long fun day just turned into a peaceful usually warm evening.