Last week we took a trip to Wildwood NJ to visit the ocean. Now most people love to go to the beach when they visit the ocean, and we did go swimming, but for our family the highlight was crabbing. We all enjoy catching (and eating) crabs. It is more fun than regular fishing, because there is so much more action. Plus crabs just taste better than fish. The first night we got to the crabbing place around 5pm and threw in our traps.
We caught the crabs pretty quickly at first, although lots of them were too small to keep. It is always difficult to measure the crabs because they try to get away, and sure enough they drew blood from us pretty quickly.
We persevered and kept catching them and keeping the big ones. When you see them alive it is obvious why they are called blue crabs, their legs and claws are a beautiful blue color.
By the time it started getting dark we had 22 crabs. About this time we realized it was 8:30, we hadn’t eaten dinner, and we had a basket full of crabs that need to be cooked that night before they died.
So we hurried back to our rental house, made and ate hamburgers quickly and started boiling the crabs. Now our rental house was very nice, but the people who own it obviously rarely cook. The kitchen had very few dishes or cooking implements. So we ended up transferring the crabs to the pot with cheap plastic salad tongs and cooking them in a small pot which barely fit 4 at a time. We had crabs skittering across the kitchen floor trying to get away a few times since the tongs didn’t work well. My 14 year old thought this was hilarious, however I didn’t find it nearly as amusing as she did. In fact she insists I was “freaking out”, which might be an accurate description! We decided to cook the crabs and make crab cakes the next day, since it was getting so late.
We were still picking crabs at 11:30 at night. We learned our lesson though, and when we went crabbing the second time we started at 3pm and quit by 6pm, so we were able to enjoy the crabs that night.
