Crab Man

The senior Sartins relocated to the Eastex Freeway in Beaumont. Doug Sartin and his wife, Kim, opened a second location in Nederland. Doug lost the Nederland restaurant in his divorce. Then he and his second wife, Emily, opened the Highway 90 Sartin's in Beaumont a few years ago.

The Highway 90 and Nederland locations survived Rita, but the storm destroyed the Sartin's that had belonged to Doug's parents.

"Where did you go when Rita hit?" I asked Doug.

"Me and my buddy Ricky got 15 cases of beer and rode out the storm in China," Sartin said. China is a small rice-growing town 25 miles or so inland. "In four days, we drank all 15 cases," he said. "Then we went around giving away food to volunteers. We had 600 pounds of shrimp at the restaurant that was going to go bad anyway, so we cooked it all up and gave it away."

Ahead of us, the crab boat we were looking for was chugging along the horizon. "You ready for a beer?" Doug asked his buddy, crabber Craig Ray, as we pulled up alongside. Craig already had a tall boy going, but he took another one anyway, and Doug and I got ourselves fresh ones, too. Then we climbed on board and checked out the crabs.

Craig Ray is a burly bear with a crew cut and an anchor and ship's wheel tattooed on his enormous upper arm. The day I met him, he might have been intimidating, except that he was wearing shorts and goofy-looking white rubber boots and was grinning from ear to ear. In fact, he never stopped smiling the whole time I was on his crab boat.

His bright white 21-foot Carolina skiff is a shallow-draft design built on a flotation hull that draws a mere six inches of water. The day we went out, the deck was shaded by a piece of bright blue vinyl stretched across a metal frame. The deck was always wet, but the water that washed over it didn't have to be bailed; it drained out of several holes in the aft.

Ray has been crabbing for 27 years. He said that there is some stone crab fishing down in Galveston, but he fishes exclusively for blue crabs. The blue crab's scientific name, Callinectes sapidus, translates to "savory beautiful swimmer." It is the only crab species of any commercial significance in Texas.

Most of the crabbers on Keith Lake use smaller boats, Ray said. The big skiff has made his life easy. He steered the boat while his deckhand pulled up the traps, marked by colored plastic floats. The first trap held 14 crabs of various sizes.

"Is that normal?" I asked.

"If they all had that many crabs, I would be home already," Ray chuckled.

Strangely enough, Hurricane Rita has improved the fishing. "This is one of the best seasons I have ever seen," Ray said. "Hurricane Rita stirred things up. The oxygen level of the water is way up. And so is the salt. I've heard that those dead zones out in the Gulf of Mexico were all shook up. It sure cleaned this area out. There used to be an oyster reef in the middle of the lake that I couldn't get my boat over. It's gone now. The oysters are spread out all over. All the sand bars and debris were washed out, too. The crabs sure like it. I'm seeing more sponge crabs [egg-bearing females] than ever before."

Not that Ray was making a lot of money. The storm put the local restaurants that bought crabs out of business. It also closed down the distributors who needed electricity for refrigeration. There wasn't any reason to go crabbing for a while because there was no one buying. But the storm did wonders for the crabs themselves.

Ray also talked about the cycles of the crab season. The crabs hibernate under the mud when the water gets cold, he said. They get active when the water warms up, usually around April. That's when they spawn. The peak of crab season is from May to August. Then there's a second spawning season in August. If you parboil the crabs first and then freeze them carefully, you can stockpile them during the summer and use them when crabs are scarce in the winter, he said.

A light bulb went on over my head. The first time I visited Sartin's was in March, and I was disappointed. Half the crabs I got were disgustingly mushy. Evidently the restaurant serves frozen crabs in the winter.

Add crabs to a long list of foods whose seasonality Americans have lost track of. With tomatoes available year-round, only gardeners seem to remember that summer is tomato season. Everybody else gripes about how bad their sliced tomato salad tastes in January.

Seafood has seasons, too. Sure, you can get oysters on the half shell, crawfish and barbecued crab all year. But you'll enjoy them a lot more if you only order them in season. Oysters are sweet and plump in the winter, but tasteless and loaded with the Vibrio virus in the summer. The big tasty local crawfish are harvested in the spring. And crabs are at their peak in the summer.