Blog Crabbin'

Washington is my favorite state. The San Juan Islands are my favorite part of Washington. Lopez Island is my favorite of the San Juans.

It was in this favorite of favorite places where I learned several things, the most important of which was this: A Rock crab can pinch a man's finger off clean.

I learned this important lesson while on a small skiff with my friend Gary. I was staying with Gary and his lovely wife Leora at their beautiful house on Mackay Bay on Lopez. We were picking up crab pots - not pots so much as traps - and hoping to collect enough fresh Dungeness crabs for dinner. My job was to haul the crab pots onto the skiff while Gary sorted the crabs into two crab buckets: one for desirable Dungeness and one for the troublesome Rocks.

While the ruby colored Rock crab are edible, they are smaller than Dungeness, contain less meat, yet are infinitely more aggressive. Clearly suffering from some inferiority complex, they swarm crab pots like wolf packs, fighting off their larger cousins while eating all the bait.

Gary has begun the first Rock crab relocation program on Lopez. Hailing from New Jersey, I am intimately familiar with the witness relocation program and have had several childhood friends "disappear," presumably taking on new identities in another part of the country. Gary was transplanting the Rocks from his favorite crabbing spot on the North end of the Bay to the South end - rather like relocating Wiseguys from New Jersey to South Florida.

As I hauled up the first of several pots, I saw fiesty little Gumba crabs were swarming around the bait angrily and several of them fell through the trap landing in a scramble by my bare feet.

With a look that said, "You want a piece of me?" a particularly maladjusted Rock crab opened an impressive left claw and aimed a stiff pinch at my little toe. Luckily I juked to the right, grabbed one his back legs and tossed Rocky overboard. That was when Gary taught me the most important lesson of the trip: evidently, there are a number of crabbers on Lopez with missing appendages.

My digits intact and the Rock exodus complete, we discovered that we had caught just enough of the sweet Dungeness for a lovely dinner. We steamed the crabs in fresh sea water and served them with drawn butter, corn on the cob, pasta salad and summer's bountiful blueberries all grown on an organic farm on Lopez.

As Bruce Springsteen, the "Jersey Bard" said, "Summer's long, but I guess it ain't very sweet around here anymore."

I'm sure the Rocks would have agreed.