Crabby Patty
On the Coast of Sonoma County
One of the great things about having a lot of well travelled friends is that no matter where I go (and I go a lot . . . ) someone I know has always been there before.
My pal Richard, who has travelled the world taking beautiful pictures suggested a look at Bodega Bay, 50 miles up the coast from here. He mentioned this is the area where Hitchcock shot parts of The Birds.
Immediately upon arriving (as these things will) my plan changed for Bodega Bay. The first place I walked into had this really weird display of Hitchcock and Birds items. I lingered over the 1963 TV Guide... but at $49...
The familiar sights/sounds/smells/vibe of a fishing harvest being bought were in the air. Being from a coastal region myself, and having been involved with seafood in a variety of ways since birth (eating, overeating, buying, selling, cooking) I had to get a closer look...
They'd eat you first if they could
It was a live Dungeness crab off-load. I noted that the basics of purchasing a trawler catch hadn't changed all that much in the last 40 years. The Captain/Owner stands at the back of the boat, watching like a hawk; they buyer sits in a chair on shore with a clipboard, watching like a hawk; a team composed equally of deck hands and dockhands accomplishes the task of moving the catch from the hold to the packaging to be loaded on the truck.
Selling crabs in Bodega Bay - counting beans from the back of the boat
It's a very coordinated, efficient and mostly silent operation and I knew better than to ask any stupid questions. OK, I did ask one stupid question and got away with it: the forklift driver allowed that each truck left full with 12,000 pounds of live crabs.
Loading semis - 6 tons live Dungeness, 15 tons H2O
Granted, most of my experience is with the Blue crab down on the Gulf Coast, but it seemed to me this larger, oranger crab was just as anxious to bite people as they were as anxious to bite him...
Tourists are quicker than crabs
M. Lee
-bodega bay, ca