Ode to crab

How do you eat your crab? Store-bought crab-leg crackers and picks or just your teeth and jaws with a dactyl ripped from the end of a crab leg? Do you crack open the crab, dig out the meat and place it in your mouth, fingers dripping with butter and garlic, or do you make a pile of meat and then eat it all at once with a fork?

Are newspapers strewn all over the dining room table to catch the mess a tradition in your family?

Do you buy it cooked, cleaned and ready to go or do you toss a crab into the well-salted boiling water yourself, clean and eat hot morsels of crab flesh, unable to wait until it's all cleaned and chilled?

Imagine a clear, moonlit night, slopping around in the stern of your boat, exhausted, breathing the salt air, smelling of the sea, pulling up the crab pots, mentally counting the money, laughing with your fellow fishermen and women, the radio squawking the weather forecast. And dumping the crabs from the pots into garbage cans and hauling ass to the seafood buyer at the marina, your harvest lifted onto the docks by cranes and placed in oxygen-rich saltwater totes and racing back out so you can dump your pots and start all over again.

On May 23 and 24 twenty-six boats from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community motored to Skagit Bay for a 27-hour opening.

Johanna Porter and Hyung Andy Cho, co-owners of One Ocean Products, Inc. out of Bellingham and crab buyers since 2014, waited at the Swinomish south-end marina as the boats pulled in with their catch. Porter started her career in 1980 with cray fishing in the Sacramento River. "Easy fishing," she said. "Tube fishing – you just run a garden hose over them. Not like crab that require so much care with oxygen and saltwater to keep them alive while shipping around the world."

One Ocean Products buy from both tribal and state fishermen from Alaska to California. With "live-chill systems" in their Bellingham and Blaine shops, they can keep the crab alive before shipping them around the United States and South Korea in saltwater and oxygen-aeriated 600-pound totes.

With only two hours of sleep since the previous day, looking dazed, standing under a tent and near a table stocked with coffee and powdered-sugar donuts for her crew, Porter suddenly jumps onto a forklift and moves a full tote to a waiting truck. Her sleep-deprived workers gear up for the next run of boats coming in out of the early morning mist.