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You May Count on That!

"The safest place to hold the Dungeness crab is its back. Although the hind part of the crab is commonly used to pick up the crab, their claws can sometimes reach the holder's hand."

Wikipedia is absolutely right about that.  One mean little vixen, whom had been lured to latch onto a piece of chicken leg until it reached the surface--it having no business, except hunger, for doing so; it not otherwise supposed to be caught with a pole--resented my trickery and nipped my finger.  Dungeness crabs--perhaps crabs in general--are very quick to take exception, and even quicker to strike out. 

My brother, Stan, has a C-Dory, and ever since he first proposed it, I had been looking forward to going with him into Puget Sound, north of Everett, to set crab pots.  Unfortunately, the daily limit for crabbing is five crabs, and since I did not have a license, we could not legally catch more than ten crabs in the two days we went out.  I can assure you that the first five crabs we caught, each day, were legal in every way.  I can also assure you that Dungeness crabs are so delicious that, had we caught two or three times that number, they could not have tasted better. 


Stan is a commercial fisherman, so the thought of not having commercially-sturdy, even if sport-sized, crab pots explains why his crab pots weigh a hundred pounds each, empty, hanging over the side of the slippery boat, with no room to spare.  Stan assured me, after each haul, that the weight of the pots had absulutely nothing to do with his generous offer to take me along; and that those two-inch thick, two-foot long iron bars in the bottom of the pots were necessary to keep the pots right-side-up.  The boat does have a small winch to haul up the pots, but its usefulness ends, more-or-less, at the water line. 

After the first pot or two, Stan said almost nothing about my age, nor the fact that he remembered me as being much stronger and much more agile when I was younger, or that Becky, his wife, who is allergic to crabs, was very good when he could entice her to come along.  He just let all of that go unmentioned, after a while. 

As we all say, the proof of the Dungeness is in the eating, and something like Jesus turning a few legal crabs into about two dozen loaves and fishes (so to speak), we had fresh crab for two days; enough, Biblically said, for a congregation of about five thousand, with three crabs left over, when friends and relatives had eaten their fill and taken some home. 

(You may note that my arithmetic is precarious, but it is all in the interests of assuring you that we did, indeed, catch five legal crabs each day.)


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