SA fishermen are being asked to devise ways of tapping our blue crabs resource on a commercial scale.
Research suggests that large reserves can be exploited without affecting the viability of the species.
Certainly I have never met a blue crab with a large reserve; blue crabs are outgoing, particularly on the receding tide.
So this call for commercialisation and mechanisation is likely to be resisted tooth and claw by us old crabbers of the northern beaches.
Certainly we are likely to wade into any system that will deprive us of the last chance of peacetime hand-to-hand combat outside the bargain sale and the smorgasbord.
Crabbing is an expedition, a marathon of the mud flat and mangrove; person against the hostile environment.
We meet the crab on its home ground, the treacherous territory of the tidal sea.
We do not skulk echo-soundered and Esky-pampered upon some four-berth fishing layabout.
We are there in the thick of it with nothing between us and the maddened bluey but a broom. handle and a hoop of rusty chicken wire.
Even on a summer day there’s a nip in the air on the mud flats; the scream of the weaklings bringing a faint grin to the sunburn of the old leather lipped campaigners whose vintage shoes have squelched their foot prints in the salty sands of tidal time.
We know the dangers heaving our spare tyres over a St. Kilda flat; that awful occupational hazard of crabbing—shellgrit foot.
Crabbing is an individual contest not to be vulgarly commercialised.
One is alone out there, hauling one’s old tub behind and her shrieking every step of the way.
Some people are up the creek in crabbing.
Yet what is there to compare with triumphantly humping your bluey across the outer reaches of Middle Beach, the finger-like chimneys of Torrens Island smoking quietly into the azure morning, the receding tide chuckling among the weed, the cockles burping soft protests as the sea draws back its covers from their bed.
One heads across the primeval ooze, waving one’s crab net and shouting primeval statements.
There’s the instinct of the hunter, the nostrils flaring while herons, long-stilted, beak delicacies from the weed, with everywhere the wading birds and some of them very pretty in their sunsuits.
This is the rapture that the crabber knows.
If crabbing is reduced to mere remote control, what is there left?
This season we have al- ready been preparing, sorting out our old sandshoes and practising at the nets.
Max Fatchen