When I was a thin-lipped Provider, each day had to pay.
Lobsters were five pound notes, crabs small change, fish was mainly bait apart from those few courtcard species.
Now I am catching to eat, not to sell.
So I boiled and dissected those spiders, cooked wrasse, and have vowed, finally, to try and skin a dogfish.
Today I ate fiddler crabs.
They were delicious.
Fiddlers, Lightnings, Velvet or Swimming crabs: for years I danced them out of the pots, trying to avoid their nips, as fast as possible, straight back into the sea. That was, unless I was desperate for bait.
(-Some lobsters I am sure resist the lure of those fast-food restaurants that drop in around them, by avoiding 'exotic baits ' and eating only 'wild' foods . The biggest lobsters that I ever caught were in pots baited with bits of crab.)
I wouldn't describe a pan of fiddlers as a meal, but then who knows what chastened times might lie ahead: they would brighten up a diet of potatoes or poor bread.
They would be great beach food.
This isn't just siege cuisine, but a means to adjust some of the species imbalances our selective, industrial fishing has fostered.
I've thought perhaps too often that the plague of spidercrabs and dogfish show our brutalizing of the Sea's ecology, just as the increase in gulls and rats reflects our wastefulness.
So in human society, where the rats and sharks and gulls prosper, and quieter, more subtle souls suffer.
I don't include myself in that unlucky category, as I ponder which board to nail my dogfish to, prior to skinning.
But if you fish with anything more than a bent hook, you will catch more than you can, or want to, eat.
Netting is Spiders Stop Play.
I had hoped Llys Meddyg, a fine local restaurant, would buy some, but it is still too quiet, and anyway they really only will want the claws.
There IS meat in the main body, admittedly not a lot, but how do I handle this?
Would I kill skylarks and bison for their tongues? What do I do with the bodies?
But I can't set a net until I have an outlet for those spiders.
A SURFACE NET! I wondered about buying some floatline to lash onto my existing nets, but the man at Advanced Netting humoured me for a while but said plastic milk bottles would be just as good.
I like suppliers who stop me wasting money or effort.
It is all too easy to get carried away in pursuit of your prey.
Two drawbacks are that the net will be very visible, and that there are a lot of fish jumping out there which I suspect are sewin...
Another strategy I'm going to try is a keep box.
The one I've made won't hold many spiders, but will save me boiling solitary lobsters and crabs.
The hardest thing now will be where to pitch it, for security from rough weather and from other humans.
Problems, Problems, once you try to evenly spread the fickle gifts of the Sea.
Bent hook fishing has its shiny side.
