Crabbing Is a Delicious Pastime If You Can Stand the Stench of Rotten Fish

Freshly steamed Dungeness crab heart—shaped like a tiny, cream-coloured star—does not taste all that bad. It is not tough nor sinewy. It melts in your mouth, and the flavour is subtle compared to the buttery meat found throughout the rest of its delicate body.

Its recently molted crab shell, on the other hand—which is just as edible as the meat this time of the year because it is so tender—is like a seafood version of a pig's ear; intense and cartilage-like. I chew and swallow a very small piece but Kelly Laviolette is not fazed by its flavour at all.

This probably has to do with the fact that Laviolette has eaten fresh crab every single day for the last 37 years.

These are a few of the things that you learn when you go crabbing for the first time on Oregon's coast—that and the fact that you will smell like rotten fish for an indefinite amount of time, and that you will very strangely not mind the stench after a while. Laviolette is the owner of Kelly's Brighton Marina in the Nehalem Bay and, judging by the way he fearlessly grabs the fish carcasses to use as bait for crabbing, he doesn't mind the seemingly eternal crab stench either.

He has graciously agreed to join me and five other novices from the city out to the coast and attempt to teach us how to successfully go crabbing. Crabbing season is open year-round for recreational purposes in Oregon. (Commercial crabbing is much more complicated.) For the lucky few who have shunned the rat race of the city to live by perhaps the most beautiful state on the West Coast, crabbing is somewhat of a local pastime. The extremely scenic drive takes less than two hours from downtown Portland, though crabbing often gets overshadowed by salmon fishing or visiting oyster farms. The prime season for crabbing is as soon as the rainy season is over, usually from December to August.

"Half the job of being a crabber is just being OK with touching the bait," Laviolette jokes as he loads the last of our crab net pots filled with fish guts onto our tiny boat. Formerly an ex-cop for Portland's public schools, Laviolette instantly knew that crabbing was his destiny as soon as he cast his first basket into the freezing waters of the Pacific Northwest.

"Being a cop in the city soured really quick. I like to live in Kelly's world, where only crab and salmon die."

He and his family are originally from Canada but they moved to Tillamook County and got into the crabbing business in the 70s, shortly after arriving here. His mother owns a neighbouring crabbing business right down the bay, Jetty Fishery.

"My family and I were meant to do this. I love spreading the word of crab and Oregon realness," Kelly says.

Laviolette calls the crab net baskets "restaurants" or "bars," since the goal is to lure crabs into the standalone net contraptions and pick them back up while they are still feasting. Kelly has rental boats, a campground, sells $19 crabbing permits that are good for a few days, and has all of the equipment necessary to become a prolific crabber.

It's similar to fishing: You choose a spot that you feel lucky about, drop a basket, choose another random spot, and repeat until you are out of baskets. The only other big difference from fishing is that you must physically pull the rope from the cold water yourself, which requires a fair amount of elbow grease. Nonetheless, Kelly assures me that anyone can do it, including a gun store owner he knows who "only has one arm and is a tiny little thing." Kelly also swears that crabbing is the best activity for a bachelor or bachelorette party. "Just don't get drunk before crabbing like the men do; drink after, like the women do."

After being out in the frigid wilderness for about an hour and scattering our baskets, it was time to pull them back up. I was the first to reel mine in. It requires a swift and fast pulling action so that the crabs don't crawl out of the basket as you pull them to surface. My haul was full of females—noticeable by their spade-like marking in their bellies—and a few males, with more phallic markings, that were too small to keep. You can only keep male crabs that are a little bigger than six inches long.

Our next stop, just a few feet away, brought an even larger haul of females and just one male that was large enough to keep. The last one brought in one more male and a dozen other females. At the end of the trip, we only came back with two males to be shared with six people. Crabbing can be a bit unpredictable this way. Luckily for us, Kelly's Brighton Marina is also a commercial crabbery where you can come in and buy freshly caught and steamed crab, clams, and oysters by the pound. That's what my group did, since by that point we were all voraciously hungry for crustacean meat.

The Pacific Northwest style of preparing seafood is a lot more minimal than East Coast style. There is no drawn butter, spices, or any degree of frying at Kelly's. At this time of the year, when the crabs are molting, their bodies are fattier than the rest of the year, producing pockets of egg white-like morsels of luscious crab fat speckled throughout the tender meat. They are too delicate to freeze so they never make it farther than a few miles away from the bay. The only other accompaniment to an Oregon-style crab feast are frosty bottles of thick, craft Oregon beer and dry cider.

While it may be strange at first to go crabbing, you may be surprised at how fast you get used to it. After all, crab with beer is a very beautiful thing.

Javier Cabral was a guest of Travel Oregon and Feast Portland. They did not preview or approve the story before publication.