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The self liberated mud crab |
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Monday, 03 December 2007 |
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 After fishing at Crystal Creek, Jill and Brad brought home a particularly feisty crab. Each of the crabs had been tied and put into the kitchen sink but one crab was able to escape anything we put him in, including the laundry tub.
On the weekend Frank took Jill and Brad crabbing, they stayed overnight at the mouth of Crystal Creek and fished out of Frank’s tinny. They caught about half a dozen mud-crabs while they were there, along with about 3000 mosquitoes; or was that the mosquitoes caught them; Jill came home last night covered in bites, she counted 150 bites on one arm and 200 on the other she says. They ate a couple of crabs at the shack and brought the rest home.
I put the live crabs into the kitchen sink thinking that they would be docile enough not to get out. While I sat at my computer in the lounge room I heard some crashes and bangs in the kitchen, I didn’t pay any attention to it because they are the sort of noises I hear when Jill is in the kitchen, I went about my business until I heard something scampering across the tiles behind me. A rogue mud crab was scurrying to the front door and as I turned to look he changed his path to seek refuge under my desk. I like the type of seafood that is dead, cooked and on my plate to be eaten, not the type that is scurrying across my floor trying to avoid being dead, cooked and on my plate to be eaten.
As soon as I stood in an attempt to capture the fugitive mud crab he bolted in the opposite direction and hid under the center of the dining table, I told the cunning crab that he might as well give it up because he was to be my lunch like it or not. As I knelt down to reach under the table he backed up onto a chair leg and was ready to put up a fight. Mr. Mud-Crab forgot to bring his weapons, his claws had snapped off in his fall from the kitchen sink to the floor so I caught him with ease. An accomplice had also got out of the sink but he wasn’t so lucky when he landed, although unharmed he was upside down and unable to get away. I felt pretty tired and in my forgetful state I somehow thought that I could keep the crabs alive and contained in a laundry tub full of mildly fluorinated town water. As you might already know, that stuff would kill any fish let alone a saltwater mud crab.
I went to bed and in the morning I got up and checked the crabs, three were dead and one was missing. The smell was pretty rank too. At first I didn’t notice that same notorious crab had managed to go AWOL again. I don’t understand how he got out, maybe it was a rope made from bed sheets or tiny grooves he filed into the side of the trough to form a ladder. Jill found string in the downstairs bathroom but thought nothing of it, but after a house-wide search we found him hiding in the downstairs bathroom.
He will not evade us this time. Let us see Mr Mud Crab escape from a pot of boiling water with the lid on. |
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