Crabbing

Yesterday we whizzed 15 miles south of Billericay to one of the crabbing hotspots of the UK.  None other than Canvey Island.

Crabbing is one of the top seaside activities over here, along with sitting on rocks on the beach in the wind and rain and swimming in the freezing ocean!

Armed with home made crabbing nets (a bit of string, some bacon and one of those net thingies that cover fruit) off we went.  Daniel was the keenest as evidenced by the photo of his feet!  If you're going for the whoppers it means wading through a bit of mud!

We actually arrived at completely the wrong time when the tide was right out, so didn't initially use the carefully constructed bagged bacon string baits.  Instead we went for the bum in the air, head down, rock turning approach and at the end of the day we had successfully captured about 38 nippers.  Some of them enormous like the one on my hand!

After about an hour and a half, just as we were winding things up we noticed it - the tide coming in.  In the midst of our bums in air, heads down crabbing we actually heard it first and then looking up we could see the water level rising.  Within about 20 minutes a good 20 metres of previously exposed beach was covered in water.  I've never seen anything like it!

And with the change in landscape, and obviously the crabbing conditions, we decided to give the original carefully constructed bagged bacon string baits a try.  No sooner did we chuck one in did a wee crabby attach and was hauled into shore.  Actually hauled is probably a bit of an overstatement given our string was about 2 metres long and the crabs probably weighed all of 5 grams!

And when we finally tired of the excitement we chucked all of the little crabbies back and headed across the road for some chippies (eaten with tiny wooden chippy forks of course J) and a bit of a go on the penny-pusher machines.

All in all a good day out J