Fixin' a crab dinner!

See those two "monster" crabs? (haha) Well, that was dinner tonight! Janet and I are now crab experts in the land of crabs. We caught em ourselves, boiled em, cleaned em, and relished em! You can have no more fun than that here in the waters of the Chesapeake.

See more on our case of the crabs at the end. First we need to get caught up from the last blog entry.

Here I am at the St Clements Island Potomac River Museum (that's a mouthful) last Tuesday. A week earlier we had cruised past St Clements Island and I showed a picture of a 40-ft-high cross and a cool lighthouse on it. I remarked how in 1634, Lord Baltimore landed with two ships and 140 men to found the state of Maryland. Well, there's a museum dedicated to that landing, and it has its own dock for visitors. That's Breaking Away out there.

Trouble was, there was a big swell slamming the boat against the dock, and that made us uneasy, especially because we stayed there an extra amount of time while I rode the bike to a grocery store 4 miles away. Poor Janet tried her best to continuously position the fenders to minimize the banging, but it was still bad enough to make her think the boat was going to crack apart.

This relentless swell was a surprise given that the long 55-mile cruise that day had been flat and boring. The only exciting thing had been when the Navy came on the radio telling me exactly where I had to cruise down a 4-mile section of the river to avoid their explosives exercise. They had Navy boats monitoring both ends of this section of the Potomac. Anyway, the bad swells came only as we were finally docking near the end of the day.

This picture shows St Clements Island in the background. It used to be 400 acres in 1634, but is only 46 acres now. Lord Baltimore (actual name - Cecil Calvert) wasn't actually on the boats that came over; he sent them, because King Charles I had just given him sole ownership of the land that comprised Maryland. Calvert's goal was to provide religious freedom, since he was a persecuted Catholic in his pro-Protestant homeland.

It turned out the landing party stayed at St Clements Is for only three weeks, before deciding to move back down the Potomac 20 miles to St Mary's River. We went there the next day. On this night, we couldn't wait to leave the dock and sail back farther to an anchorage in calm water. We dropped anchor in the same place we'd been a week earlier. Such a peaceful spot it was!

The next morning, last Wednesday, we cruised the 20 miles down to St Mary's River, and tied up at a free dock at St Mary's College. The college is all that's there, where in the 17th century had been an active town and the state capital. When Maryland moved the capital to Annapolis in 1695, the town declined and vanished (as a town) before long.

The area became farm land, until in about 1934, when Maryland wanted to celebrate the 300th anniversary of its original founding, people, and then archeologists, discovered relic after relic from the original town. Before long, the state converted the entire 800-acre area into Historic St. Mary's City. It has been, and is to this day, an active archeology area, and is now also a tourist attraction.

Janet and I paid our fee, watched the intro movie, and then walked all over the acres to see "ghost houses" like the one in this picture. They have found where building posts had been, but they know little else in their attempts to reconstruct houses. Still, in a few cases, they have reconstructed them as best they can figure and have described how life was in the 17th century. They have found millions of artifacts in their digs.

The two ships that arrived in 1634 were the Dove and the Ark. This is a replica of the Dove, the smaller of the two. What was interesting about the Ark is that it carried 106 tons of beer and 6 tons of wine!! These adventurers knew what would keep them content on their grueling challenge in a new world. I think it's only right that Breaking Away has tried to emulate the libations these early settlers deemed important!

When we completed our touring in the blistering heat and humidity, we rested on the porch of the college boat house. You can see Breaking Away out there.

Once we returned to the boat for a happy hour of homemade fruit slushies, we noticed some kids doing something on nearby rocks. We guessed they were crabbing, but I had to find out for sure. So over I went, and Yes, they were indeed getting crabs. The girl would throw out a line with a chicken neck as bait. Very quickly, crabs would attach themselves to it to eat it. She'd pull it up slowly, and when the boy could see it near the surface, he'd net it. If the crabs get too near the surface, they let go, so the netter has to be quick. They had a bucketful of them, and it was fun to watch. As I was leaving, a family of 7, with baby in his carrier, arrived to do the same thing.

We eventually left the college dock and traveled a couple miles back to a side river, and then into a quiet cove for the night. It was so beautiful, and we took a long dinghy ride to explore the entire river and its many coves, as the sun was setting.

The next morning, yesterday, we cruised south across the Potomac to the Virginia side. Our destination was the private dock of Eric Hentges and Sue Borra, friends who had been at our boat party in Washington, D.C. (and at the Bon Voyage party a year earlier before we departed on the Great Loop). Eric and Sue are building a home here, but their dock is finished and they offered to let us tie up. We've been here two days, and it's a beautiful spot! We've seen a bald eagle fly across the bay, lots of ospreys, herons everywhere, a big white goose, a million swifts, terns, cardinals, and other colorful birds. Fish jump constantly, and during our dinghy explore today we saw a big turtle surface for a breath. (One important goal of the dinghy ride was to find beer. We haven't been near any stores since Monday in Alexandria! A distant marina had the prize.)

Both yesterday and today, Janet and I have been seriously cleaning the boat, since the trip is almost done and Breaking Away will be up for sale. We scrubbed and polished and disinfected...the venetian blinds, the upholstery, the moldy ice-maker door, the black streaks on the hull, polishing all the metal railings, and on and on. We were exhausted yesterday in the high heat, saved only by cloud cover.

A side benefit to Eric's and Sue's dock is that they have two crab traps they said we could use. So, we've been baiting them with anything we could find - pork fat, pork bones, ham, steak. And you know what? Janet and I got crabs! Two of them got into one of the traps. Here I am pulling up the trap when we finally decided it was time to eat them. And see how pretty this setting was?

Janet's addition: Late last night we found 2 crabs and a fish in the trap, and thought what the heck, we are not going to mess with them this late, so we set the trap back thinking the population would grow during the night. Imagine our shock and disappointment to wake up and find the cage was empty. The crabs we got today were probably the same that we had, and escaped, but trapped again.

Here I am reaching into the cage to grab our crabs and toss them into a bucket. Good thing I was wearing gloves, since they quickly pinched my hand HARD when I went for them. When I got them from behind, they grabbed onto the wire cage and would not let go. No matter how hard I pulled, their claws held on. I finally had to use all my finger strength to separate their claws to loosen their grip and pull them out of the cage.

We then tossed them into our freezer since the website we consulted said it was more "humane" before dropping them into the boiling water. We were just hoping they wouldn't tear into our frozen broccoli in there.

Eventually we removed them from the freezer and plopped them into the boiling pot. 10 minutes later, we had them out on the dock cracking them and cleaning them.

Finally we got to eat em up, using my tool-box pliers to crack their claws. We got crabs!

One reason we had to stay here today was because there were small-craft advisories out on the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay. Tomorrow is supposed to be better, so our plan is to cruise up to Solomons, a boater's paradise. We will meet up with Andy Benson, whom we visited last Friday at his office in D.C. He has a boat and a weekend home in Solomons. We're planning on a party weekend once we arrive! If all goes as planned, Breaking Away will cross its wake next Tuesday where Bruce and I began a year ago May 4th. What a celebration that will be!

Janet's comment: Being out here with Ken the last few weeks has been exciting and novel! I feel honored that I will be with him when he "crosses his wake" sometime next week. Meanwhile, even though we are spending time each day cleaning bits and pieces of his boat, we are having wonderful adventures.