Crabs!!!!!!! Day 2

We had an incredible first day and went to bed happy. Then we had to get up at 5.30am to get the crabs. Tony wasn't too sure about that... We drove on out and were greeted by two bald eagles watching over us as we worked.
Pulling pots is a team effort. One person drives the boat, another catches the pot and pulls it up, another coils the rope as it comes in. You also need another person to make sure it's all going well.So here it is! The first pot up. And it was a good one. We had to sex the crabs (males have a pointy triangle on their bellies, females have a round bit) and measure the good ones. Femals or small were thrown back. It's quite an art to get hold of the little beggers.So here's one of the coolest and grossest things we learned about...starfish. Crabs don't like starfish. Star fish have a little beak in the centre of them and they jump on the crabs back using their beak to poke through the crab's shell and eat them! Yuck! And they aren't just small and orange with 5 legs...

We caught an ENORMOUS one the next day but didn't have our camera. It was about a foot across and had about 24 legs and was red and black and slimy. It looked like an alien.
As did Tony! He looked after Loomis (5 month old Goldendoodle) while I...Drove the boat!!!!!!!!!!

What do you do with 22 crabs? Cook them and eat them of course. So next lesson was what to do with a live crab to turn it into dinner. Matt showed us how to hit the crabs' sleepy spots to make them more manageable. That one woke up.
Let the killing begin! The Malones like to kill the crabs before cooking rather than boiling them alive so we learnt to crack them on axes, pull the legs off, remove the lungs and cook them in fresh salt water. Mwuahaha