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Better known as the Chesapeake Blue Crab.  Man, I love em'.  I've never blogged about my addiction to crabs until today.  I have no idea how I lived in downtown Baltimore for 6 years and never got into them.  (Unless you count the one time, I choked on a piece of shell and road my bike to the ER for throat x-rays.  I thought I was going to die.  True story.  I'll save it for another time.  Though perhaps that's why I never got into them.)  I think we've eaten crabs 6 times so far this summer.  One weekend we even ate them on a Saturday, only to turn around and eat them again on a Sunday.  And they're not cheap!  We pay about $60/dozen large.  We're lucky to live only 10 minutes away from a great crab house too; the Blue Point Crab House.  We've had some really great crabs from this place.  No duds, no wimpy ones.  Always perfectly seasoned with Old Bay. 

I can't think of anything better on nice summer day, than sitting at the table in the yard, munching down crabs and sucking down some ice cold Natty Boh.  Such a tasty combo.  We put a way a dozen large crabs yesterday, though we ate inside due to the insane heat we're experiencing lately.  We nearly went back and bought another dozen!  We prefer getting them already steamed, and munching down at home, but we do eat them when we're out and about.  Here's our experience in the Baltimore area:

A couple of  weekends ago, Debbie and I met some of her family for a vacation on Little GasparillaIsland off the southwest coast of Florida.  The island is only accessible by water taxi which made for a truly secluded and peaceful trip.  We spent 5 days laying in the sun, fishing, barbequing, walking the beach, swimming and enjoying some much needed relaxation.  The house we rented had a fabulous hammock on the screened-in porch, which is where I spent a majority of my time, though I took a lot of photos and attempted some time-lapse photography with my D800.  The time lapse photos didn’t amount to much, but I did enjoy sitting on the beach while my camera snapped frames of the setting sun, waves broke and the ocean breeze blew a brackish wind over me. As Hawaiian music played from my phone I sipped cold beer and the stress from the hectic world of work melted away.  Perhaps the highlight of the trip, for me anyway, was catching a few ghost crabs which scurry across the beach at night, and steaming them. People don’t usually eat these crabs because they are so small and don’t amount to much of a meal, but the crab-lover in me couldn’t resist trying them.  I steamed and ate three of them.  To be quite honest, they were delicious, albeit small.  The meat in the body was difficult to get out, but the legs and claws did have an appreciable and delicious quantity of very sweet meat!  Here are a few photos from the trip.