Down at the Bay

Last Saturday we packed up our crabbing gear and headed down to the Chesapeake Bay for the day.  Our intentions were to catch enough crabs for a delicious dinner, but the weather had other plans for us.  It was a beautiful day but the wind was against us and we lost a lot of crabs to the waves.  We didn't come home with any but we had a great time outside!

Alex was kind enough to do the chicken prep (ughh) while I took pictures and organized our supplies.  For anyone that doesn't know how to crab, there are a few different ways but we use the crab line method.  Chicken is left out of the fridge until it's a little smelly, then you tie it onto lines and attach the lines to a pier.  When the lines are tight or moving against the waves, you know that a crab is eating the chicken.  Then you slowly pull in the line and scoop up the crab with a net.  Usually the crabs have no idea that they're being lifted to the surface.  In our case, the waves were strong enough to disturb the crabs and cause them to drop off before we could net them.

We did end up catching a few crabs.  Our first crab was just a baby so we threw him back.  We'll return for you in the spring, crab, so eat up!  After that, we caught a huge crab.  It was much larger than any of the ones we caught over the summer.  There were no other people out crabbing so I guess the crabs have had time to grow since no one is out catching them.  We lost a bunch of crabs in the waves for the next few hours so we decided to take a break and come back a little later.  I'm the meanwhile, we headed over to the big pier to try to get a glimpse of the bay bridge in the distance.  No sighting.  Alex claims that it's there, but I think that's all a myth.

We went back to crabbing but after a while I got tired and we still weren't catching anything.  We decided to let our lone crab go because what's the point of cooking just one?  Plus, I was starting to feel a little bad for the guy.  He looked so cold in that cooler.  So we put him in the shallow end of the water to warm up before swimming out into the deeper water.  Once he had set off, we dropped the chicken into the water and cut off our lines.  As we were pulling out one of our last lines, what do you know, we caught another crab.  Another HUGE crab!  If only we hadn't let the other one go... but what are you gonna do.  I guess it was just their lucky day.

Crab #2 was also thrown back but you better believe that we'll be back for them soon.  We're hoping to be able to spend more time down by the water next year now that we have more free weekends.  Once we get some work done down there, we'd love to have friends come down for a barbecue and maybe i'll also be able to serve some freshly caught crabs!