by Larry Chowning –
Virginia’s commercial crab pot season opened on March 17 but coronavirus has local seafood businesses and crabbers wondering what type of crab market this season will bring.
There are three crab markets for watermen within the state’s crab fishery. Watermen working crab pots supply female (sooks) crabs to picking houses where the meat is picked, packaged and sold to grocery stores and restaurants. Customers buy the meat to make crab cakes.
That market has been soft of late as area picking houses have closed because the labor pool of crab pickers has declined. Also, less expensive foreign picked crab meat has filled some of that market void. There are, however, a few local picking houses turning out picked crab meat.
Those same watermen who work crab pots sell their male (jimmies) crabs to a basket market. This market is a strong local market for crabbers. Jimmies are sold live to customers in bushel baskets and are steamed by the buyer or at the crab house.
The soft-shell crab market is the third market. A blue crab grows by periodically molting (shedding) its hard exoskeleton. When a crab first sheds, it comes out with a soft-shell. Fried soft-shell crabs are considered a delicacy. The main market for soft-shells are restaurants in cities. About one-third of all soft-shell crabs caught commercially in Virginia are caught during early crab runs in March and April.
“This creates a real problem for us,” said Lee Walton of Walton Seafood in Urbanna. “We always work the spring soft-shell crab runs because we have a good restaurant market. If all the restaurants close down, we are going to have a very limited market for our crabs.”
Walton would by now be rigging and working toward the startup of the peeler crab season. A peeler crab is a hard crab that is in a molting stage and soon to be a soft crab. “We are just waiting to see what happens (with coronavirus),” he said.
In the meantime, Walton is harvesting oysters for what has become an extended local grocery store market for his business. “We sell oysters (pints and quarts) to Urbanna Market and other local grocery stores,” said Walton. “What we are seeing is that with the scarcity of other meats on the shelves customers are buying our oysters and that has extended our oyster season.”
Walton also said, if the crisis continues, he will probably work in the crab pot season catching jimmies and limit efforts to catch soft-shell crabs.
“We have not put crab pots overboard (for jimmies) in the spring in the last eight or nine years because we work the peeler runs,” he said. “We do not have many people come to our seafood house to buy a dozen soft-shell crabs but we do have a lot of people who come in the summer to buy a bushel basket of jimmie crabs. If this continues, we are going to depend heavily on the local basket market to survive,” he said.
One picking house still in operation in Middlesex is J&W Seafood in Deltaville. Susan Wade of J&W said she normally has Mexican crab pickers working at her crab picking plant. They work under the Federal H-2B visa program and are legally allowed a temporary stay to work in the United States.
“Our borders are completely closed because of coronavirus and my pickers cannot get into the country,” said Wade. “I’ve postponed buying crabs (from local watermen) to April 1 and now I’ve notified crabbers that I’ve postponed it again to April 15. I can’t buy but so many hard crabs when I don’t have pickers,” she said.
“It is insane,” said Wade. “My store (J&W Seafood) is open. I understand that because we sell food it is considered an essential business and should remain open. I have no idea though where we are going with our crab picking operation.”
Waterman Thomas Eskridge of Deltaville is working crab pots in Chesapeake Bay off the mouth of James River and is catching about 20 bushels of crabs a day.
“I’m catching about 12 jimmies in 20 bushels and the rest are sooks,” said Eskridge. “I do not have a picking house market to sell to but right now my buyer has a mixed crab (sooks and jimmie) big city basket market.”
“Right now, his customers do not care if they are eating a sook or a jimmie. They have not had a crab since last year and they just want to eat and pick hard crabs. That won’t last long and I’m not sure how long this (mixed crab basket) market will last. When it stops my only market will be with jimmies.”
Joey Williams of Thomas Williams & Son Seafood in Remlik has not put his crab pots over yet but is fishing his gill nets to catch menhaden to bait those pots.
Williams said he does not know what the season is going to bring but if there is a crab pot season he will have enough bait in the freezer to go to work.
There is at least some optimism in that!
