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Tangier Crabbing Experience, Tangier Crabs, Crabbing Experience The Tangier Crabbing Experience Until now there hasn’t been a way for visitors to the island to see and experience working Tangier. You can now-- by going out on crabbers' boats or into the crab sheds. We're calling the tour:
The waterman’s tour will place you on a hard crab boat, and into a crab shanty where soft shell production is completed. You will also watch a crabber on a "bar cat" boat work his scrape and pull it aboard while he looks for "peeler" crabs.This tour focuses on the world of working watermen. Time details about the waterman's tour can be found by clicking on Itineraries & Packages here or on the button just to left above.
Capt. Andy Parks shows how to spot a crab ready to shed its shell. Waterman's Tour Description Your will start you tour by going in to a crab shanty on the afternoon you arrive. There the waterman can show you how he spots a crab ready to molt and you will observe a crab shedding his shell. The Crab Shanty Tangier bills itself as the soft crab capital of the world. Not all crabbers there shed soft crabs. But the ones that do, have neat crab shanties. Some of the shanties are attached to the island but most are on pilings out in the water. Here the peeler crabs are watched and sorted into different floats as they get closer and closer to shedding their shell and becoming a soft crab. The floats aren’t really floats but above the water wooden tanks through which water is pumped. The name is left over from when the soft crab industry started. Then unable to efficiently pump water, watermen kept their soft crabs in floating boxes in the Bay itself.
Once a crab has shed its shell it begins to harden. Within three or four days it is fully hardened but within just a few hours it is no longer edible as a soft crab. For this reason the floats must be checked every three to five hours in order to make sure this valuable product remains this way. In the crab shanty the waterman will show you a hard crab backing out of its shell. Waterman call a crab that has cracked open its shell, in order to escape it, a buster. This feat of nature amazes nearly everyone as the crab makes like the Hulk busting out of his shirt and skin, only better.
In a matter of minutes, when a crab pulls out of its old shell, it will expand in size by one third. Even watermen, for whom this should be old hat, almost universally express their wonder at this process.
Electric lights hang above the floats so the crabs can be checked during the night. Because of the round-the-clock nature of the task many of the crabbers and their wives split up the task of monitoring the floats. Once the soft crabs are lifted from the water they stop hardening. They are lined up like toy soldiers in wax-impregnated cardboard trays and packed in master cartons. Many of these cartons end up in New York in the Fulton Market or in Baltimore in the Jessop Market.
In the crab shanty the waterman will show you how he can tell, by looking at the crab, when it will shed. It takes a practiced eye to see this but you will be able to read the signs of a crab that is getting close to shedding. The Boat Trip The next morning you will go out on a Chesapeake Bay workboat to watch and understand how hard crabs are caught with a hard crab pot. If you are on one of the boats with a pot puller and a mate you will see fast and furious action. The captain steers the boat down the crab pot line and reaches out and hooks each crab buoy line, which he puts in the wheel of the hydraulic pot puller, which raises the pot. As the pot comes out of the water he passes it to the mate who shakes the crabs from the pot, baits the well and tosses the pot overboard. In the meantime the captain is on to the next pot and the process starts all over again. A mate who shakes out 400 pots in one day earns a good night’s sleep.
Capt. Denny Crockett pulls a new vinyl coated pot. Vinyl doesn't corrode so it does require expensive zinc annodes. The Captain will also stop the boat and show you how they sort the sooks (females) and the jimmies (males) into separate baskets. He will show you how they look at one of the crab’s swimming fins to see if it is about to shed its shell, how the pot works, how he markets his crabs, what his current price is, what crab regulations are, where he goes to catch crabs at different times of the year, how crab’s bait preferences change with the time, etc. If you are on a boat without a crab pot puller and a mate the action will be a little slower but the process will still be basically the same. You will also pull along side a bar cat boat and watch a waterman pull a a smooth scrape on board by hand. He will sort through the scrape looking for soft crabs to go in crab shanty float that you worked the day before. On a barcat you can observe most of a crab's life cycle. A barcat is a modified deadrise designed to work in very shallow water. Obviously, it can creep over sand bars like a cat. The waterman by law and tradition pulls the scrape aboard by hand. It’s pretty easy to spot a waterman who has spent his life doing this by looking at his arms and shoulders. The barcat slowly pulls a net, held open with an iron frame, over eel grass where crabs ready to molt hide.
When the waterman lifts the scrape into his boat, which is usually named after his wife, he dumps the scrapes contents into a sorting trough built on top of the boat gunwales (side).
Then he quickly sorts through the contents looking for peeler crabs (crabs which will shed their shell in the near future.) As you watch this sorting you will most likely observe crabs at all life stages. You may even see a “doubler crab.” This is a male crab carrying a fertile female crab beneath him while he impregnates her and then protects her from predators while she is still soft. Until her shell hardens she is quite vulnerable to predators.
Boats and Crab Pots on Tangier Crabs have been taken from the Bay since prehistoric times. However, the catching method has changed with time. The crab pot is an innovation that wasn’t widely adopted until after World War II . Before then, hard crabs where caught mostly with a trotline, a method still used in some rivers in Maryland. Crab pots are square boxes made out of chicken wire but a professional crabber never baits them with chicken necks. Until crab pots were adopted, Tangiermen were usually fishermen relying on pound nets to catch fish. They also rigged trotlines to catch crabs and scraped for softcrabs. Unfortunately the last Tangier pound net was taken down in 2004. Only a small amount of commercial fishing is done on Tangier now. Tangiermen do oyster in the winter. Catching Hard Crabs with a Deadrise The crab pot innovation allowed Tangiermen to make a better living catching crabs. Although with decline in catch and fewer crab picking houses, even that has become increasingly difficult. Hard crabs on Tangier are generally caught using a classic and beautiful fishing craft, the Chesapeake deadrise. Elsewhere on the bay and to some extent on Tangier other craft have been adopted for crabbing because of lower maintenance and other cost savings. However, because of their seaworthiness, pretty lines and tradition, the deadrise remains the preferred craft for most Tangiermen. Deadrises are a waterman’s friend in heavy weather. The wooden boats are built mostly by old time boatwrights using plans contained only in their minds’s eye. Each one is a little different. Sometimes this method of construction is referred to as rack of eye. You probably have to be a Bay boatwright or Middle English language expert to know precisely this means. But an approximation might be building it by sighting down your arm across you thumb until the lines are right. Building a boat this way requires a knowledge passed down from previous generations and a mariners experience. One rack of eye practioner explained it this way, “I just go off a ways and look at her and if she don’t look right, I change her.” Deadrises from different areas of the bay have different shaped sterns and slightly different construction methods but you can always recognize a deadrise regardless of where it is built. It is usually a thing of beauty. Contact us today for more information on any of the tours on Tangier Island.
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