More Crab Racing

As I have been scanning in these slides the story becomes clearer. They call the crab races the National Hard Crab Derby. You buy a crab and they put a number on their shell and you name your crab. I was number 99! "Whitney". I don't know how well I did as my dad didn't take any photos of the standings. Oh well.

Back to the races. They then take your crab with your number on it and put them in these troughs with little dividers on it. Then when the race begins they dump the trough and out come the crabs and the first one over the finish line wins. I want to say they win a trophy and money.

By looking at the crowd it is quite a popular sport!! I believe they still do this in Crisfield today. I remember something on TV about it last year.

This is a picture of me with my mom.

Up and Running...

I am up and running on scanning in old slides. This one is from the Crisfield Crab Festival in 1971. It is a yearly festival in Crisfield, Maryland. We used to go most every year. Crabs are big in our family. From when I can remember summer meant being at the shore with my grandparents and crabs. Catching crabs in traps, moving the crabs to the live box, my grandmother getting in the water with a big basket and getting the crabs out of the livebox, and steaming and eating the crabs. Summer life revolved around crabs. We steamed them and ate them. My grandmother made "She Crab Soup" which was a vegetable soup with big pieces of crab in them. No not crab meat but chunked crabs. You ate the soup until you found a claw or a piece of crab, shell and all and pick it out and suck the crab meat out of the shells or pick the meat like you would steamed crabs. We had crab salad, like ham salad or chicken salad. We had crab cakes and fried soft crabs. And on and on. We all loved being at the shore. The house was on the water, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We would take the boat out and fish. We would fish off the dock. We would swim and swim and swim. We would jump off the dock and swim around to the shore or to the ladder and climb back. We would jump off the dock and swim down three more docks to my other grandparent's home. I was lucky because both my grandparents summer homes were just down from the other. My cousins would come and we would swim.

Back to Crisfield. At the festival there were many events including a crab cooking contest, pig catching contests, crab picking contests and the highlight-crab races! You would buy a crab (live of course) and they would paint a number on it and enter it in the races. Then they would race the crabs down a specially designed track. The fastest crab wins. All crabs get cooked at the end or you can take your crab home with you. We would take ours home and cook him there.

In 1971, as a child of only one year, my crab came in 99th!! My father's came in 83rd.

The crab picking contest was also fun to watch. The contestants were usually the women who picked crabs for a living right there in Crisfield. They worked in the factories and did this day in and day out. They can pick some crabs!