Crabbing season has started again; much to my great joy.  Tonight I ate three crabs, mostly all by myself - although some of the choicest pieces went to Kelsie, who actually enjoyed the meat a lot; which is a lot more than she expected to.

Crabs are wonderful.  Unlike fish you don't need a big production to cook them.  Just throw them in a pot for a few minutes and they're done.  They do take some tools to get them out; and as far as I know they are the only food that requires pliers to eat - but that's fine.  The thing I like best about them is that they come in their own biodegradable packaging.  Its a chitin-based wrapper, and when you're done you can spread it around your homestead; throw it in the fire or re-donate it to the sea.  Plus, I think you can eat crabs raw without poor effect - and they go after and eat the parts of salmon that people don't want to eat so its a symbiotic thing.

Tonight I ate a red-rock crab and it wasn't poor eating.  It was a bit harder to get out of its shell than the dungeness crabs have been.  I decided that the reason they're called rock crabs isn't that they live in rocks - it is because their shells are as hard as rocks.  Even at its hardest, the dungeness shell can be bit through; not true with the rock crabs.  Their meat is a bit more salty and flavorful - more than I actually really like as a matter of fact; but good eating if you don't have anything else I suppose; and eat them I did.  I'll keep any rock crabs I snag in the future and enjoy them hearily; at least that's my plan.

The dungeness tonight were 2.  Both of them caught and well enjoyed withing minutes of eachother.  There's just something better about fresh crab that haven't been living at the supermarket.  I don't know what it is - but it makes them better, that's for absolutely certain in my humble opinion.

Today I made a jumble with my pot placement and tried to throw a couple of pots outside of where I've normally put them.  We'll see how that goes - it might yield more delicious crabs and it might yield fewer, but since I used different pots than the ones I've been using it wont' lower my overall yield in any case.

The crab pots are going to need some retrofitting I think.  The ones with the metal sides aren't working quite as well as I had hoped they would.  Perhaps for the new placement I should be using commercial-type pots anyhow; we'll see if placing one of those outside will yield good results or not.  Also, perhaps I'm just being too impatient and not letting my pots sit long enough, and fill up the way they should.  Maybe if I left the pots down there for weeks at a time they would fill up with crab and I could go catch them in one great load.  Possible, no?  

I'll try some new things tomorrow.

Today we moved more of the firewood up to the cabin.  We moved all of it away from the marina - although most of it is just in a big pile in the shed, where at least it is dry.  It needs to still be stacked, and I suppose we'll work on that tomorrow.  Kelsie has been a great help with this wood project, and she's been nicely rewarded with a warm house to enjoy while she's been here; and she has my thanks as well - but I hope she enjoys it (It is exercise too, after all, right?).

She's sleeping on the couch right now, after having spilled some water on the floor and not realizing it.  I hope her dreams are happy.

Dom