CTFishTalk.com: Blue Crabbing - West Haven 08/05 - Connecticut Saltwater Reports ( CT Saltwater Reports ) - A Community Built for Connecticut Fisherman.

PECo · Joined: 06 Oct 2009 Posts: 5203 Location: Avon, CT

I went crabbing for the first time in Connecticut on Friday night. Luckily for me, asianfisher (aka Billy) is back in the state and wanted to scoop up some blue crabs at low tide. We were on the water from 9:30 pm to midnight. We launched from the boat launch ramp on Monahan Place in West Haven and worked the area between a small marina to the northwest and a sandy spit/breakwater to the southeast. The depth of the water varied from one to three feet. There was a slight southeast breeze that slowly rose until it began to ripple the water enough to make it hard to see as midnight approached. We were with Billy's cousin and his girl. They paddled one canoe and we paddled another. I say "we", but I was really just a passenger in the bow of Billy's gondola. He did all of the work. Thanks, again, Billy! Very Happy

Quite frankly, I don't think that I have the balance needed to drive a canoe. Billy stood in the back with a spotlight slung over his shoulder. He paddled or poled us along, depending on the depth of the water, and would sweep the spotlight over the bottom. We looked for the white faces of blue crabs on top of and hiding in green seaweed. When we'd spot a decent sized blue crab (i.e., at least five inches across the back of the shell from tip to tip), Billy would position the canoe so that I could scoop it up with a dip net from the bow. I have to admit that I missed quite a few of them. I felt bad about that, because Billy was working pretty hard in the back, especially whenever he had to fight the breeze. However, Billy was very gracious whenever it happened; I guess that missing crabs is gonna happen from time to time. We ended up with four or five dozen crabs, including four or five softer shelled crabs that had recently molted, although I wouldn't really call them soft-shelled crabs. They felt like bags of water when you picked them up. Weird. We got only three or four keeper females and saw only three or four pairs of mating crabs. Every pair of mating crabs was a big male on top of a tiny female. Billy's cousin and his girl got only a dozen keepers, but they didn't have Billy's experience in their boat. Here's a bad photo of our catch:

I took home only eight of them, because it takes me 15 minutes to pick the meat out of one crab, and I don't have the patience to sit and pick crab for much more than an hour. When I got home at 2:00 am, I cleaned and steamed them before throwing them into the refrigerator and going to bed. My wife and I had four of them for breakfast, and I made spaghetti with crab sauce (aka crabetti) with the other four for lunch. Subsistence fishing ain't such a bad thing.
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asianfisher · Joined: 12 Jan 2009 Posts: 920

Had a great time phil.... to bad family robbed me of most of them... I proly only got to eat almost 2 dozen of them... wanna go back soon... thinking it will get better with the females and when they get in in #'s it will be great out there... I got a pic at the house when I get back to ct again will post it.... 8 days from today tide will be right again...

DirtyDawg10 · Joined: 27 May 2009 Posts: 2238 Location: Granby, CT

Sounds delicious Very Happy