The Travels of "Fruition": I went to Crisfield & Got the Crabs

Everything in Crisfield has the crab logo

We’re finishing our second week in Crisfield MD, celebrating July 4 with a hurricane offshore. We’ve really gotten around the area to spread lots & lots of our Yankee greenbacks.

Wild ponies on Assateague Island

Just a couple days after our arrival at Somers Cove Marina, we were joined by our sailboat friends Bill & Jeanie aboard S/V “Nemo”, who we first met in North Carolina. We went sightseeing together, ate crab together, and held a Hurricane Party (an old New Orleans tradition) together. Everything was much more enjoyable sharing the experiences with friends.

We rented a car for a couple days to expand our horizons. First we went to Chincoteague and Assateague Islands on the Eastern shore of Virginia. Chincoteague seemed to be your typical small tourist town along the coast, but Assateague had a National Wildlife Preserve where the wild ponies live. We saw some ponies, but only at a distance. As we took the nature trail around the area, we did see a lot of other wildlife (which was quite different from the wild life that I saw in college!).

Bambi was out in the open on the nature trail

On the way to Chincoteague, we passed the NASA Wallops Island VA rocket facility, the oldest launch facility in the US. This was where NASA first launched unmanned rockets, long before Cape Canaveral was invented. Since Congress & your President shut down the manned space program, Wallops Island continues to launch unmanned rockets for satellites and to supply the manned space station.

Lighthouse at Assateague Island. This is one we
didn't get to climb.

The Boardwalk in Ocean City MD

I called my sister-in-law in upstate NY for advice in visiting Ocean City MD. She & her husband vacationed in OC several years & knew the place well. We went up & down the Boardwalk where the typical tourist stores sold what they could, and admired the wide, white-sand beach. To me, it looked like a mini-Myrtle Beach. We then drove a couple miles south to the northern end of Assateague Island & saw the other herd of wild ponies right next to the road.

The wide beach at Ocean City & the "Screamer" boat

Jeanie and Bill join us at the Blue Dog Café
(not related to Lafayette LA artist John Rodrigue's Blue Dog)

Bill & Jeanie joined us to visit the Blue Dog Café in Snow Hill MD, which I had heard about from another boater we met in Coinjock NC. In short, it was a superb dining & entertainment experience. One of the owners had been an understudy to a Broadway play in NYC, and sang for us all evening. Most of what he sang had some humor in it. For example, he continued to sing while he helped to bus dishes into the kitchen, and while he was mixing drinks behind the bar. At 9:00 on that Saturday, he broke into Billy Joel’s song “Piano Man”. It was a most enjoyable evening.

Sue eating her soft shell crab, with
my crabcake sandwich in front

For dessert, we had Smith Island Cake - a 10-layer
cake like a New Orleans doberge cake,
made only on Smith Island

These watermen with their crab boats have finally
become our friend, after dodging thousands of
crab pots this past month

Tangier Island has the same crab on their water tower

And then the crabs. No matter how hard Sue tried, she couldn’t eat more crabs than what the watermen were bringing in each day! We went on a walking tour around Crisfield to visit crab processing plants for both hard shell crabs and for soft shell crabs. We learned that Crisfield supplies the entire US with about 80% of all soft crabs. A crab will molt its shell as it grows about 20 times in its 3-year life. A soft shell crab is processed right after molting, before its new shell begins to harden. To do so, the hard shell crabs are placed into bins, based on how close they are to molting (I guess the crab itself & the “watermen” processing it both know when that happens). The crabs are then monitored every 3 hours, around the clock, until they start to molt. As the molting progresses, the crabs are moved to the next bin and the next one, until at the last bin the crab has fully molted and it is moved into the processing facility. Most soft crabs are shipped all over the country as live crabs, so they are shipped out the very next day from Crisfield.

The hard-shell crabs, on the other hand, are cooked and picked right in Crisfield. The hard crab industry has changed little over the last 100 years, so if your momma worked at the crab-pickin’ plant, so did you. When you buy lump crabmeat in plastic containers, the meat is fresh. If you buy it in metal cans, it has been frozen or pasteurized.

Crab shanties along the entrance to Tangier Island

As if the plant tours weren’t enough, the next day we took the ferry over to Tangier Island, where crabbing is the only business. Being a somewhat remote island, Tangier is basically stuck in the 1950’s. Most residents speak a dialect with a British accent, going way back to when the British took over the island to base their Chesapeake Bay campaign during the War of 1812. All along the entrance channel to the island were crab shanties where the watermen keep their boats & traps, and where they’ve set up their own soft crab bins. Each morning, they’ll send their molted crabs into Crisfield via the daily mail boat.

Loading the boat with supplies and mail, headed to
Tangier Island. Reminds me of similar activity years ago
when I visited my relatives on the Lake Erie Islands.

Two cemeteries across from each other on
Tangier Island

The other interesting item about Tangier Island is the existence of about two dozen cemeteries on a 1 x 3 mile island. Apparently, way back when, the residents would bury their deceased right in their yard. Either that, or there was very lax enforcement of the zoning laws. Headstones are now right next to the kids’ swing set or the laundry line.

Narrow road on Tangier Island. Very few cars on island.
Mostly golf carts and scooters (like Put-in-Bay
on Lake Erie). Note another cemetery on right.

So now our July 4 Hurricane Arthur. It passed this morning about 100 miles to the east of us, having made its first landfall last night on the Outer Banks of NC as a weak CAT 2. Our marina is pretty protected, and we’re on a floating dock with 12 dock lines holding the boat. Still, the boat has been dancing around in its slip all morning. We had very little rain, and winds have been about 35 mph gusting to 50. So this makes the 3^rd hurricane our boat’s been in (or close to), along with the 2 tornados and one marina fire. Maybe I should look to see if there is a bull’s-eye painted on our transom!