Crabbing

A while ago I posted about our Seafood Boil.  I'm trying to catch up on my blogging (not very successfully), so its a little behind.  A couple of days before our Seafood Boil we decided to try to catch our own crabs.  I mean, how cool would it be to be able to say we caught the crab for the boil?

So we headed down to the good ol' fishing port.  While we were waiting for the crab nets to arrive, we did a little exploring.  First off we checked out the crabs at the fish market.

Kids always love checking out the boats and all of the seals on the docks.

Yay, the crab nets arrived!

Think the kids were a little eager?

Music Man hunted down a big Halibut caucus from a fisherman in one of the fish markets.

Captain America and Marvel thought it was SO awesome! (Blah...yuck...gross!)

They cut it up for crab bait.

While we waited for the crab nets, Marvel did a little fishin'.

This was boy heaven, I tell ya!

Captain checked out some of the seals down below the pier.

The nets were raised...and...we have a catch!  Hooray!

Unfortunately one particular seal decided to snake our Halibut bait.  He even looked back at us as he flipped it into his mouth.  He was doin' some serious mocking I tell ya!

I love where we live!  No wonder its called "the Happiest City in America!"

Boats.

I love boats!

Just sayin'.

And I believe this is our final catch.

I think we got a total of 8 in all.  They were little suckers.

We some how were put in charge of storing the crabs until the Boil.  What the heck do you do with 8 salt water crabs for 3 days? 

Not knowing diddly-squat, we turned to the internet.  Everywhere we read that you either have to clean them out (live!), then freeze them, or boil them live, then freeze them.  We decided boiling would be a little more humane then straight up cutting into them.

The boys tried to grab a few of them to throw in the pot, but the little suckers were too squirmy.

I guess our thought of boiling the crabs live wasn't as humane as we had hoped.  It was somewhat of a traumatizing experience.

Boiling crabs from the store isn't so bad...they're already dead.  

Music Man does NOT have the stomach for this kind of stuff.  He's too tender hearted.  If we had to live off the land, we'd either all be vegetarians (although he doesn't have much of a problem gutting fish for some weird reason), or I'd have to muster up the gonads and do it myself.

Music Man was completely traumatized (has something to do with back when he was a kid and they raised a pig and his dad told him not to watch when the guy came to slaughter it, but he snuck over and watched anyway and has never had a stomach for ANYthing even remotely gross since!).  He even made us all stop and say a little prayer to offer thanks and to ask for forgiveness for killing the boogers. {I'm sitting here chuckling just thinking about it!  That was so out of the norm for him.  I suppose I should have taken this as a spiritual experience...but, nope, it was quite humorous}.

I can't say it didn't effect me either, though.  I'd throw them in the pot {yes, I would do it, because MM couldn't muster it} and they'd try to crawl out and you could see them get slower and slower until they'd just look up at us helpless, then they'd float onto their backs.

SICK!

The funniest part of it all {other then Music Man's prayer} was that once they were dead, MM had NO problem gutting the things.  Now THAT was gross to me.

Ya, I'm not so certain we'll be investing in our own crabbing gear any time soon.

Lets just call it a learning experience and leave it at that!

While we were distracted by the dying crabs, our little Monkey snuck into the fridge and grabbed a block of cheese...a BLOCK of cheese!

And he ate it!  What a monkey!

Apparently Cap thought it was a GREAT idea and decided to partake of the feast!

"Seriously, Mom, did that REALLY just happen?  He stole my cheese!"

Oh, good times, good times!