Good morning. There’s a spot way up in the back of the bay where the shore splits into a creek and the water runs fresh into salt. There are blue crabs there, Callinectes sapidus, beautiful swimmers, and soon enough they’ll be big enough to trap and steam. They aren’t yet, though, and so for a…
Americans aren’t particularly enthusiastic about seafood. We eat less than half of what a Japanese or Indonesian person does. Less than a third of the average Icelander. But there is one big exception: shrimp. Our appetite for the fat little crustacean has increased for decades, with the average American now eating almost six pounds per…
Good morning. How I’m hoping it will go today: light wind from the southwest, sun high in a cloudless sky, low tide around 2 p.m., a striped bass slipping along the creek where I’m staked out and inhaling the crab fly I’ve put right in front of her with an effortless cast. How it will…
My cousins and I used to dare one another to touch the shrimp, their 10 legs dancing, their antennae waving. At the Chinese seafood restaurants near us in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California, the servers would bring our orders, still alive, to the table for approval before taking them into the kitchen. In…
Good morning. It’s skinned-knuckle season, the time of the year that’s all about stuck bolts and crushed washers and hydraulic fluid and bottom paint, sacrificial zincs and ceramic wax — old boats coaxed back to health so they can run us to the fishing grounds, so we can cast flies to bass. I skinned my…
