Confessions from a wildlife abuser....

Crap, I must be hungry, my mouth just watered. Off to lunch. You are a lucky man to have access like that. All we have out he is Red Lobster or the Casinos for crabs = super fresh I'm sure.

Actually I haven't been able to get any blue crabs since that time. The supply around here seems to have dried up.

Mating season...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by Neilengland

Mating season...

Perhaps, but the late Summer and early Fall months have always typically been the prime season for blue crabs for as long as I can remember.

Hmmm.... They're just too delicious for their own good lol


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (WAVY) — The heat makes it’s hard to remember just how cold our winter was. But there’s a constant reminder for Virginia’s watermen that’s affecting their wallets, too.

Blue crabs are big business along the Chesapeake Bay during the summer months. They’re a Virginia tradition — steamed, deviled, or battered up and fried, blue crabs are in high demand for miles around. But this year, they’re in short supply.

Watermen, like Ray Wicker who owns Wicker’s Crab Pot Seafood in Chesapeake, say they aren’t seeing the bounty of blue crabs that they’re used to.

“We specialize in blue crabs and soft shell crabs,” Wicker said. “We normally have a good run of female crabs that we catch over in Ocean View and in the Willoughby area. This year the water temperature was cold and we lost a month of crabbing.”

Experts say frigid water resulted in one of the worst die-offs in recent history, killing more than a quarter of the Chesapeake’s blue crabs. The number of female blue crabs has reached a 12-year low, making Ray’s big spring run for bushels, a bit of a bust. And that pain gets passed to consumers too.

“When crabs are plentiful we do all you can eat, but right now we have just by the dozen,” Wicker said. “We used to catch a bushel out of every 10 pots and now we’re catching, shoot we might catch 10 bushels out of 400 pots. Our business is mainly crab and crabmeat, so a lot of our prices have had to go up due to the shortage.”

Ray said at his restaurant they’re making adjustments to the menu, little by little. He’s hoping things will rebound before lines of hungry customers die down. He said a couple of other issues compounding crabbers problems right now are restrictions limiting how much they can work. And he said the fertilizer many people use in yards dumps right back into the rivers, causing grass to grow up on their equipment, adding to maintenance costs.

This article is a year old but I'm sure still applies

Crab catch dwindles in Indian River Lagoon

Add blue crabs and stone crabs to the list of wildlife plummeting in the Indian River Lagoon region.

While crab harvests can vary widely year-to-year, the long-term trend has been a downward spiral.

According to a FLORIDA TODAY analysis of state data:

Brevard’s commercial blue crab catch in 2012 was less than one-tenth what it was 25 years ago and the lowest since Florida began collecting the data in 1986. Fishermen bring ashore less than half the pounds of crab each trip than they did 25 years ago.

• Last year’s statewide harvest was less that half 1987’s peak. But while last year’s statewide commercial catch was 32 percent lower than the 27-year average, Brevard’s was 75 percent lower.

• Thecommercial stone crab harvest also dropped drastically in Brevard in the past 30 years, from a peak of 6,742 pounds, almost 57 pounds per trip in 1989, to 2,875 pounds last year, just 8.3 pounds per trip.

“This is the worst year we’ve seen for local crab,” said Jan Walker, vice president of Clayton’s Crab Company. That’s saying a lot: they’ve been in the business 46 years.

But Brevard’s dismal crab catch may be mirroring larger, regional downward trends.

“It’s not just us, it’s all over the country,” Walker said, referring to the similar reports they hear from Louisiana and North Carolina.

As supply has dropped, Clayton’s crab prices have increased 20 percent over the past year, Walker estimates, with jumbo blue crabs recently going for $8.49 a pound.

But the blue crab decline, in particular, raises concerns broader than just price increases. They are considered a “keystone” species, providing prey for many other important species and serving a valuable scavenger role along the lagoon bottom. Theories of their decline include natural cycles and more runoff from development that feeds algae blooms, clouding out the crabs’ seagrass hideouts. That leads some to keep blaming numerous massive redfish for gobbling up all the baby crabs.Others point to crabbers over the years taking too many virgin female, soft-shell “peeler” crabs, or past overharvesting of clams and the subsequent loss of their water-cleansing ability.

Fueling the uncertainty for both blue and stone crabs: a big portion of the catch is unknown. There are no estimates of the recreational harvest, suspected to be substantial.

But what is quantifiable paints a dismal trend for commercial crabbers, who daily pull up seaweed-filled, often-empty traps from the Indian River Lagoon.

“I’ve been through some bad ones, but this is the worst,” Mark Radler, of Merritt Island, said of the 40-plus years he’s harvested blue crabs in the lagoon.
Blue crab decline

In general, the overall mass of blue crabs in Florida dropped from the 1950s through the 1980s, increased a bit during the early to mid-1990s before significantly dropping during the late 1990’s, according to research by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

http://www.floridatoday.com/article/...n-River-Lagoon

I live in Arizona, a desert state. No fresh seafood here. Last time I had real fresh seafood was when I went on vacation to Catalina Island in California....5 years ago. �� The live lobsters you get from the grocery store just aren't the same. They are practically tasteless, comparatively, and I won't even mention the 'fresh' fish from the meat counter.*sigh*