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ROBERT N. JENKINSA company in the Keys offers amateurs a hands-on opportunity - they hope - to harvest crab claws. The challenge: making sure the harvesters' fingers stay attached.
MARATHON - With Bennett Orr at work, the repetitive nature of the labor is obvious. Try it yourself and suddenly there is a challenge, even a thrill:
Do I have the stone crab, or will it have me?
Travelers can take the challenge by booking aboard one of the fishing boats that occasionally takes out landlubbers for a couple of hours. As many as six passengers can try to separate crabs from their claws.
Orr works on the 43-foot fishing boat Coral Key 5. Standing at the stern, he usually is part of a three-person crew that leaves the dock by 4 a.m. to haul in special traps that hold lobster or stone crab.
The work is assembly line: One crew member uses a wooden pole with a metal hook to snare the line that connects a plastic foam float on the surface to a large plastic box about the size of those plastic cubes we use for storage.
Once the nylon line is snared, it is fed into a motorized winch that hauls the box onto the stern, where a chute positions it so the only part of the trap that opens, its top, is ready for the next crew member.
That worker flips open the top and glances in. This is the payoff for work that can last 12 or 13 hours daily for more than seven months a year: The crew member hopes to find a stone crab, lured by the smell of a rotting pig's hoof. But the fisherman also knows he may find a fish or two small enough to have entered through slats in the trap.
A fish is okay; an octopus is not.
Orr is working this overcast day on a tourist outing. During the two hours or so that the Coral Key 5 is away from the dock of the Keys Fisheries Marketing Co., Orr will pull about 25 traps aboard. He will find small white octopi in three or four.
The octopus is after the same thing the fishermen are, but it wants a part of the crab that humans don't: the flesh underneath the shell that covers the crab's body.
To get to that meat, the octopus flows into a trap and wraps its tentacles around the crab's body, positioning its beak over the top of the crab. It gnaws through the shell and eats the meat beneath.
Unlike the crab, the octopus is able to slide back out of the trap, either between the slats or through the chute at the top that the crab used to enter. The chute is positioned high enough so the crab cannot reach it from inside.
Orr plucks out the squirming octopi and tosses them over the side. He checks the crab: "If it is alive, we can take the claws; if not, we toss it back into the water," he says.
If it is alive, the second crew member on a normal work shift matches his skill against the crab's instinct for survival.
Who is losing what?
"The crab uses its claws for self-defense," Orr says as he grabs a crab from a trap. Grasping the crab from behind, he holds it in one hand.
"A crab can exert 12,000 pounds of pressure with its claws, using the hydraulics of its body," he says. "You want to keep your fingers away from the claws."
That seems like a needless warning until Orr adds that some professional fishermen working the Keys thought they knew the obvious but now have fewer fingers or joints than when they first boarded a fishing boat.
Orr is wearing bright red rubberized gloves, which guard against a wet, squirming crab slipping from his hands. As he talks, Orr demonstrates how to properly twist off one claw, then the other, from a crab that does not want to give them up.
His left hand holding the crab from behind, he moves his right behind the right claw and grasps it at the joint where it meets the body. He quickly twists the claw forward and down. The claw comes off in his hand, and he drops it into a yellow plastic laundry basket.
He then grabs the crab with his right hand and uses his left to snap off the left claw, which goes into the basket. He tosses the crab over the side of the boat.
"Most of the tourists, they get excited when they get the claw off, and they toss the crab into the basket and throw the claw overboard," he says.
He snares another float and feeds its line into the winch, and as it hums its grinding sound, Orr looks around at his boatload of visitors. "Who wants to try it?"
I pull on a pair of the rubbery gloves and stand at Orr's side. He flips open the top of the trap and brings out a crab, thus eliminating the first chance for me to add, at age 60, the nickname "Lefty."
I reach under the crab with my left hand. I know the caution of the bomb-squad guys.
"Hold the crab firmly," Orr says, "and don't get your fingers between the claws and its body. The crab has a lot of strength when it wants to bring its claws against its body."
Wait a second: This is a new warning. Where was this warning when I pulled on the gloves like I was readying for a joust?
Now holding a crab that is larger than my hands, I perceive that what looked like assembly line work when done by a pro is actually a ballet of the hands. Somehow, I must hold the crab without letting my fingers wander around to the front of its body, even as I sneak up on that right-hand claw from behind, grab it and twist it off.
The crab demonstrates Orr's last caution. I can feel it bringing its claws inward and realize it is almost equal to the strength I suddenly am exerting to save my fingertips. Time to go on the offensive.
I move my right hand to successfully grab its right claw. I start to twist downward and understand that the claw does not fall off; it must be snapped off with added force.
Ruthless, Old Man and the Sea-like, I twist the claw harder until it comes off in my hand. I don't know how stunned the crab is, but I am momentarily dazed by my success.
Orr offers approval and encouragement as I remember to drop the claw in the basket. I shift the crab to my right hand, quickly grab the left claw and, this time, snap it off in one motion. Claw in basket, crab in Atlantic.
Switching from lobster to crab
It would be at this point that the third crew member would take the empty trap, stick a pig's foot in it and drop trap, line and float back over the side.
"We can pull 600 traps in a day, up to 1,000 in a day if we are playing catchup because bad weather kept us in port," says the boat's owner and captain, Karl Wagner. "We can pull 150 in an hour if the tides are right and the crew is trained.
"We are not standing behind a plow horse anymore. We have state-of-the-art electronics aboard. But this is still labor-intensive."
Wagner's is one of 19 boats that work full time for Keys Fisheries, which processes the catches and buys those of independent captains, so it processes and sells about 50 percent of all the stone crab claws caught in Monroe County, a.k.a. the Keys.
"Starting in August, we will start harvesting lobster, but by Christmas there is little lobstering," Wagner says.
The boats will place their traps up to 60 miles out. "Inshore, there are larger but fewer crabs. Offshore, there are smaller but more crabs," he says.
As he sits at the ship's controls, Wagner practically nudges a sizeable monitor that shows him the bottom's contours and depth. This equipment includes software that overlays on that image where his boat is, according to nautical charts.
"All the fishing areas are charted, with the annual catches for each area recorded," Wagner says. "It's not like it used to be: "Gee, this looks good, let's put traps here.'
"Now it's all figured out ahead of time."
"A good day is averaging three to four claws in a trap" because a trap holds at least two crabs, he says. Depending on size, that many claws would average a half-pound of meat.
"The lobster is a social animal. It may go into a trap because another lobster is already in it, but a crab goes into a trap to eat," Wagner says.
Back on the wide, flat deck, where the hundreds of traps would be stored, Orr is documenting the recent changes in crabbing. His spiel is part of the reason Keys Fisheries began the tourist trips three seasons ago: to educate buyers on the work that puts crab claws on their table.
Until 1969, the state required that the entire crab be taken to a dock, even though its body contains nothing edible.
"The mortality rate was outrageous when crabs were kept on the boat until there was time to grade the size of the claws," Orr says.
With the change in laws, "if the claw harvest is done correctly, the crab is only out of the water for one minute," he says.
The next major change in harvesting came after research by the University of Miami. Until then, the state required that only one claw be taken off a crab, so it had a claw with which to defend itself.
"But the university showed that if the crab is of legal size, both claws can be taken and the crabs will mate better because the females will not have a claw to defend themselves against the males," Orr says.
"The research is that a crab will live for seven years and can generate 14 claws. This is a renewable resource."
To preserve the claws while on the boat, the bins or buckets are shielded from the sun and occasionally doused with water.
Back at the dock, the claws are weighed, then graded as one of four sizes: small, medium, jumbo, colossal.
For the tourists aboard the Coral Key 5, the next step is the best part of the trip: They get to eat their catch.
The claws are placed in boiling water for 12 minutes, then chilled in ice water to a specific temperature.
"If the temperature drops below 58 degrees, it changes the taste of the meat, and the flesh sticks to the shell," Wagner says.
For their lunch at the picnic tables on the dock at Keys Fisheries, Orr has fried shrimp and Wagner orders a fish sandwich.
"We get stone crab all the time," Orr says between bites. "Want to taste this shrimp?"
If you go
Keys Fisheries vice president Gary Graves estimates that it would cost about $800 for a captain to take out his boat with a crew of three, plus the cost for fuel and bait, if a boat was on a crabbing run. Tourist trips have one mate, operate more slowly and may not even take the time to rebait the few traps that are raised.
Thus, a fee of $450 helps pay the costs, but it is not the equivalent of hauling up the traps over the same amount of time. "The 8 pounds of claws (that the company promises to catch and cook on the tourist trip) would fetch the captain $90 at current prices," Graves says.
Because the tourist charters do not go out every day, reservations must be made. The charters usually leave the dock at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2:30.
Participants can choose to have their share of the catch packed and shipped by overnight courier.
Keys Fisheries is at Mile Marker 49 in Marathon. For more information or to make reservations, contact Keys Fisheries Market and Marina toll-free at 1-866-743-4353 or 305 743-4353, or go to www.KeysFisheries.com