Crabbing with my friends

Tweet

OK, many people found this very shocking, but I have never been crabbing before. I have lived on the east coast, within walking distance to some sort of body of water, most of my life. For 4 or 5 years I lived in Colorado where there is no water, but the majority of the rest of my life has been spent right on the Chesapeake Bay. Now, I love to eat Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, I've practically been raised on them. My kids eat them, everyone eats them around here. And living so close to the water, it's VERY easy to catch your own crabs. All you need is a piece of string, some raw chicken (everyone always uses chicken necks because they're the cheapest) and a net. So yesterday, I went crabbing for the first time ever. We took out chicken, tied them to the string, put them in the water and waited for the crabs to start eating them. We also had a few traps that we put the chicken in, although you don't have to have those. After a while, the lines will start to move when the crab tries to take the chicken. You run over with the net, S-L-O-W-L-Y pull the line up to the surface and then swing the net under the crab. If it's big enough to keep - the shell being the size of a soda can - you put it in the cooler for safekeeping. We had to let a LOT of them go because they were too small, and quite a few got away before we could get the net under them. After about 5 hours we ended up with 4 crabs. That would have been one for each of us - not enough to even heat the water up for - so we let them go. It was fun though! What type of things have you never done that is something it seems like everyone does where you live?