A Maryland Crab Feast

Friday 11th June, 2010, day 602, 11,028 miles. 38° 47’.20N, 076° 13’.06W, St Michael’s, Maryland

“How about crabs for supper?” asked our friends Don and Mary Kay. Well, that sounds nice, we thought, imagining neatly dressed crabs lying open on their backs, with perhaps a little salad and mayonnaise tidily arranged beside them, and a slice of two of brown bread and butter, all set off with a lemon quarter, and of course a knife and fork.

Not a bit of it.  Maryland Blue Crabs are a wonderfully full-on physical, down-to-earth experience, a finger-licking, chops-smearing, tooth-picking feast for taste and touch and smell. If you crossed all-in wrestling with fine dining, this is what you might get.

The scene is set with a bundle of newspapers brought in from the garage and spread over the kitchen table, onto which is emptied a vast brown paper bag full of crabs, steamed and dusted with Old Bay seasoning, and set off with an array of implements: mallets, screw-drivers and pliers.

A platter of just-picked Maryland maize, so young and fresh that it still has a sweet green flavour to it, to set off the crabs, a quick lesson for the newbies in the tactics of successful dismemberment (in short, “get stuck in, and don’t forget the claws”), and off we go. Ooh, those crabs are good. Salty and fresh and spicy with the seasoning (which doubles as snuff if you sniff it), quite delicious, and all the better for the slightly ruminative atmosphere that develops as we all chase the last sweet fibres of flavour down into the claws and crevices. You can’t have a serious discussion picking crabs, with half your attention focussed on choosing the next spot to attack, and wondering whether you’ve picked that one dry and should move on the next, or is there just a little sweet something lurking in that joint. So we chat in a relaxed way, and eye the growing pile of shells to make sure we haven’t eaten more than our fair share, and lick our fingers, and decide we could just squeeze in one more … and chat again, and realise that essence of crab has found its way slowly up our fingers and around our mouths until we are one cat’s-dream flavoured mess. What a great way to spend an evening.

Thank you, Don and Mary Kay for all your kindness and hospitality, but thank you most of all for introducing us to Maryland Crabs.

Backwards to Bonaire

Monday 22nd March 2010, day 521, 8,840 miles. 12° 09’.58 N, 068° 16’.98 W. Kralendijk, Bonaire


Backtracking to before we went to Cuba, we had a lovely three weeks in Bonaire, which sort of got forgotten in the horrors of the Windward Passage.


Bonaire is one of three little Dutch rocks off the coast of Venezuela, the other two being Curaçao and Aruba. It is a barren place, useful back in the days of the slave trade only for salt – one of the most economically satisfying manufactures: you create it from salt water, sell it to people, who eat it, and then excrete it into the rivers which replenish the sea – and there you are, your raw materials are furnished right back to you for free by your customers. Neat.


Salt water is once again how Bonaire makes its money, but now from the fantastic, fish-filled reefs that surround it and attract tens of thousands of divers. We’d learnt to dive in St Eustatius (Statia) and plunged right in, having endless wonderful dives, and starting to identify some of the hundreds of fish. The wonderful thing about the diving in Bonaire is that the whole island is just the tip of a steeply shelving coral reef, so from anywhere on the coast you wade into the water, swim out a hundred yards, and there you are in 60 feet of water, looking down on a brightly coloured, infinitely varied world. Tomia found herself turned into a dive boat and took us off to reefs up and down the coast, from where we launched ourselves down the bathing ladder in full dive regalia and went off to explore the endless beauties under the sea.


I’m not sure that it’s possible for non-divers – as we were a few months ago – to understand the hypnotic magic of breathing underwater, in the fishes’ own environment. It’s partly the weightlessness and freedom, partly the concentration, partly the constant procession of variety and beauty, partly it just simply being a whole new, undreamt of world, hidden from surface-dwellers by the interaction of light and water. 

The fish are endlessly fascinating and varied, with each dive showing us new creatures.  We love the gorgeous little trunkfish, with little yellow fluttery fins, large luxuriantly fringed eyes and pale pink pouty lips, who will swim straight up to you to ask in a friendly way if you are new here.  Unlike the purpled, "nesting" sergeant majors, who make it quite clear (to a creature hundreds of times their size) that this is their patch, and you will find nothing here to interest you if you're wise.  And the herds of parrot fish, turquoise with pink and yellow stripes, grazing on the coral in the shallows, making a noise like - someone chewing coral.


http://www.breathebonaire.com is an underwater camera giving a little glimpse of the sub-aqua life.


We started accidentally dropping things overboard – but, in contrast to the normal cussed run of things, in a place where we had ample means of retrieving them. “You’d better go and get a tank” from Anthony was code for “Oh damn, I’ve dropped a screwdiver”. However, although we could get things back from the deeps, a drill-bit down the shower drain continues to elude us. Like the Bellman, we seek it with tweezers, we seek it with care, we hunt it with blue tack and string, we charm it with magnets, with chopsticks and skewers, with just about every darn’ thing. But to no avail. Only on boats.


Our time in Bonaire was enlivened by the visit of Anthony’s son Chris, and Anna, who were the perfect guests. With them, we rented a jeep one day and drove round the northern end of the island, a nature reserve stocked with cacti and scrub, and climbed the highest point, in the baking heat, finding their first hummingbird in an acacia tree, and then down to a tiny cool, fresh, shaded pond in the middle of all that sucked-dryness, smelling of green, visited by every bird and iguana around.


Another day we drove out to a mangrove swamp and took a tour in kayaks, swimming through a narrow muddy channel in company with a vast porcupine fish. We drove round the east and south coasts, with the waves pounding in, and back up to the sheltered west coast, with the modern salt pans looking like giant icerinks, sparkling purplish in the sun.


There were a lovely bunch of yachties there, all the boats strung out in one neat line down the shore just above the start of the reef. Several of the women were keen readers, so one night six of us gathered for a “one off book club” and sat in a bar pulling together our all-time favourites – and we barely strayed off topic all night, while our other halves discussed holding tanks and sikaflex in comfort on Willow. They managed to get the dancing girls out of the way just before we came back.


Sad to leave, as always; we have met so many wonderful people on this trip, and pulling up the anchor and waving goodbye not knowing when we shall meet again always brings a lump to the throat.

Is Deltaville the nicest town ever?

Monday, 7th June, day 598, 10.904 miles. 37° 47’.62 N, 076° 19’.56 W. Deltaville, Virginia

Is Deltaville the nicest town ever? It takes small-town friendliness to new levels. Hurd’s hardware store (motto “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it” – well, that would be true if we weren’t finicky boaters wanting everything in marine-grade stainless steel) boasts the tireless Roy, who not only searched through all his shelves for something approximating to our needs, but took us out back to his workshop where he had a collection of cast-off bits “bound to come in useful someday” from where he dug out 75¢ worth of thing-a-ma-bob which will do the job perfectly. The library was selling off its unwanted books; the most friendly librarian ever took time off from her lunch-time muffin to help me sort through the dusty shelves of American History to find the two most appropriate volumes. And to cap it all, we were lucky enough to meet the cheerful and generous Hop Murfee (and later the gentle Genia), who not only gave a lift to two strangers trekking off to the supermarket for provisions, but waited for us while we whizzed round, and then drove us two miles back to the boat. But, wait for this, Hop isn’t a vicar or a teacher or someone from whom you might expect spontaneous kindness – he’s a realtor (estate agent). A town where the estate agents are selflessly helpful to complete strangers – that’s somewhere special.