"I can remember back ten or twelve years 

 ago when soft crabs were only bringing a 

 dollar a dozen." 



— Milton Styron 



ter attending the workshop. As a 

 result, those fishermen were able to 

 shed an additional 570 dozen crabs. 

 They reported making new invest- 

 ments averaging $1,229. 



(During crab-shedding season, Sea 

 Grant operates crab-shedding 

 demonstration facilities at the Marine 

 Resources Centers in Manteo and 

 Bogue Banks and at the Aquaculture 

 Research and Demonstration Project 

 in Aurora.) 



Mark Hooper, a commercial fisher- 

 man from Smyrna, has his crab-shed- 



ding trays set up onshore. He says he 

 starts looking for peelers at the begin- 

 ning of March. By April, he's shipping 

 his first soft-shell crabs to the Fulton 

 Market in New York. For him, it's not 

 a full-time venture. "Down here, it 

 just fills in nicely between seasons." 



North Carolina crabbers have the 

 advantage of getting their crabs on the 

 market a couple of weeks before the 

 Chesapeake fishermen. That means 

 the biggest profits are made early in 

 the season. Prices begin to go down as 

 more crabs from Virginia and 



Maryland get on the market. 



For that reason, most fishermen 

 don't have large shedding operations. 

 Like Mark Hooper, they find that soft- 

 shell crabbing is a way to increase their 

 profits in spring. 



But for Murray Bridges, a 

 Collington soft-shell crabber, it's a 

 full-time business. Bridges buys 

 peelers from local crabbers, sheds 

 them, and ships them to New York 

 and other northern states. In May and 

 June of this year, he produced 12,000 

 Continued on next page 



Photo by Steve Murray 



Collington crabber Murray Bridges checks shedding trays for soft-shells 



