Crabbing
The Crabbing Experience / Honorary Watermans's Tour

The Barcat

A barcat is a modified deadrise designed to work in very shallow water. Obviously, it can creep over sand bars like a cat. The waterman by law and tradition pulls the scrape aboard by hand. It’s pretty easy to spot a waterman who has spent his life doing this by looking at his arms and shoulders. The barcat slowly pulls an iron framed net over eel grass where crabs ready to molt hide.

The Miss Stuart, a barcat, creeps slowly through the water.

When the waterman lifts the scrape into his boat, which is usually named after his wife, he dumps the scrapes contents into a sorting trough built on top of the boat gunwales (side).

It requires strength to pull the scrape aboard.

Then he quickly sorts through the contents looking for peeler crabs (crabs which will shed their shell in the near future.) As you watch or perhaps help with this sorting you will most likely observe crabs at all life stages.

You may even see a “doubler crab.” This is a male crab carrying a fertile soft female crab beneath him while her shell hardens. Until that happens she is quite vulnerable to predators.

A doubler.

You might see a hard backing out of its shell. Waterman call crab that has cracked open its shell, in order to escape it, a buster. This feat of nature amazes nearly everyone as the crab makes like Jim Carrey pulling his face back in The Mask, only better.

A buster crab starting to back out of her shell.

In matter a of minutes, when a crab pulls out of its old shell, it will expand in size by one third. Even watermen, for whom this should be old hat, almost universally express their wonder.

The dark crab was in the lighter shell just a little while ago.

Contact us today for more information on being an honorary waterman.