A fishery not feeling the pinch
Now worth more than £50m a year, the crab-fishing industry is thriving. However, it is not the British public who are shelling out
Graham Downing reports on our thriving crab industry
On a summer’s morning along the Norfolk coast the crab boats put to sea, just as they have done for generations. Launched off the beaches at Sheringham and Cromer and from the small tidal harbours at Morston and Wells, they still head out to the fishing grounds to gather their crab pots and reap the wild harvest for which this coast is famous. Today, you are more likely to see a GRP [glass-reinforced plastic] skiff with an outboard motor than one of the old double-ended wooden boats that I remember as a boy, but the fishery itself is little changed. It is still worked by local families, it is still sustainable and now, thanks to the development of new markets, it is thriving.
Although the Norfolk fishery with its famous Cromer crabs may be the best known, there are equally active fisheries in Devon and Cornwall, along the East Coast and in Scotland. Of the 36,000 tonnes
of crabs landed by the British fishing fleet in 2016 with a value of £53m, Scottish boats accounted for a little under 14,000 tonnes, while around 10% of landings from British registered vessels were made outside the UK.
The principal object of the crabbers’ attentions is the brown or edible crab, Cancer pagurus. A nocturnal predator measuring about 6in across its reddish-brown carapace and with black tips to its strong claws, the brown crab lurks under rocks or partially buries itself in the sand or mud of the sea bed during the day, emerging at night to hunt for molluscs and other small crustaceans. The hen (female) crab holds her eggs in a pouch beneath her abdomen for up to eight months before they hatch into tiny planktonic larva that develop eventually into juveniles that settle around the shoreline and grow to 2in or 3in across before migrating into deeper waters. Potentially very long-lived, an adult crab will survive 25 to 30 years, though, exceptionally, a brown crab may live to 100.
That is, if not caught and turned into crab thermidor. “A large proportion of the crab sold to the UK market is eaten in restaurants,” says David Jarrad of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain. “The problem is that crabs are not a mainstay of the restaurant trade. Unlike T-bone steak or fish and chips, they tend to be something that is on the ‘specials’ board. When prices jump up, they come off the board and people stop eating them.”
Usually that is because getting on for half of the crabs caught in Britain are exported almost as soon as they are landed, and while France and Spain are longstanding export markets, the big growth has come from China. “Chinese exports were on an embargo until 2016, when we got the markets reopened,” says Jarrad. “Almost overnight, fishermen were getting 30% more for their catch and since then demand has continued to increase. We are now entering into a phase where the exporting companies are pricing out the restaurant trade. The restaurants struggle to get hold of crabs, not because there are fewer in the sea but because they’re going to China.”
larger producers
There are a small number of larger processors in the industry. David Markham of the Blue Sea Food Company is based in Paignton, Devon, and buys catches landed at Salcombe and Kingswear. “The market has really taken off in the past couple of years and there are now 27 companies exporting live by airfreight,” says Markham. “We sell about 50% of our production overseas. We buy them in from the fishermen, keep them in tanks for 24 hours to de-stress them, and then we export.
“For the UK market we take all the meat out, and there are different markets for different meat. The very best white meat goes to the restaurant trade, while the lower grades go for pasta and seafood paste. The market demand is strong and fishermen are now making proper money.”
By contrast, Kevin Jonas sells most of his crabs within the UK. When the Cromer Crab Company was closed in 2012 by its owners, Young’s Seafood, Jonas, a third generation crab fisherman, seized the opportunity and moved his own small business to premises just yards from the old site. “We took what was then a county level business and went national,” says Jonas.
“My father was a crab fisherman, my older brothers were trawlermen working out of Lowestoft and one of my cousins runs the last wooden crab boat off Cromer beach. I started fishing in 1995 with a boat I bought off a fisherman in Sheringham. The first crabs I processed were on the kitchen table, we supplied local shops and sold at car-boot sales on a Sunday morning. There was a big demand for crab and the business just grew from there.”
Jonas buys catches from some 40 fishermen along the Norfolk coast, from King’s Lynn and Hunstanton in the west to Sea Palling in the east. “They are working off the beach and from the harbours at Wells and Morston. Nearly everybody these days has a GRP skiff. They are larger than the old wooden boats, they draw very little water and with an outboard instead of a diesel motor they are a lot faster, but all of them are still under 10 metres. The old boats had a little capstan for hauling and would usually have a crew of two or three, one hauling, one clearing the pots and one stacking. The newer boats can be worked singlehanded.”
Crabs are still caught in baited pots or creels that are largely unchanged from those first introduced to the Norfolk coast in 1862/3. Constructed on a rectangular base, they have a number of “D”-shaped hoops and are covered with netting. In the past, the frames were wooden, with hazel hoops and sisal netting, and the pots were weighted with a cast-iron weight known in Norfolk as a “music”. Now they are made from plasticcoated steel with polypropylene netting and are often padded around the edges with rubber to protect them from abrasion on the sea floor. Increasingly, the larger “parlour” pots are being used. These have an extra compartment to contain the catch and are harder for the crabs to escape from. They can also be left longer on the seabed, enabling the fisherman to work a larger number of pots. Ten to 15 pots are linked together in a “shank” and a fisherman will work a “fleet”, comprising several shanks, usually setting them one day and returning the next in order to recover the catch. The pots are baited, usually with whatever offcuts from the fish processing trade are available. “The bait depends on whatever we can get,” says Jonas. “Salmon heads are a favourite, as well as scad and gurnard. We buy the bait in, hold it frozen and then when the lads come in and deliver their crabs, we give them the bait.”
Most of the beach boats will fish perhaps three miles offshore, but the bigger boats go much farther, out to 20 miles or more. The Cromer Shoal Chalk Beds off the North Norfolk coast is designated as a Marine
My father was a crab fisherman and my cousin runs the last wooden crab boat off Cromer beach
Conservation Zone, in which trawling is prohibited. This enables the crab fishermen to continue working the ground as they have done for generations, without disturbance from more intrusive fishing techniques.
Indeed, it was the crab fishermen who were the conservation pioneers. When in the 1860s tens of thousands of small crabs were landed, along with hen crabs carrying eggs, the fishery declined rapidly. Local fishermen realised that action was needed to protect their livelihood and they called for greater regulation. The result was the Crab and Lobster Fisheries (Norfolk) Act 1876, which imposed a ban on the possession or offer for sale of crabs less than 4½in across and a total ban on the sale of “berried” hens.
Regulation has ensured the sustainability of the UK crab fishery and today the minimum landing size is 140mm across the carapace. The season normally kicks off in April, when water temperature gets above around 8°C and the shellfish start feeding, and it will continue until the late autumn.
With exports now so strong, the Shellfish Association is keen to develop the home market. “The irony is that the British public will go on holiday to France and Spain, eat delicious shellfish and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have this at home.’ Little do they know that it probably passed their door in a big truck two nights before,” says Jarrad.
There is now a move to develop the market for spider crab, Maja squinado, a species largely ignored in the UK and hitherto regarded as a by-catch. Spider crabs travel considerable distances but in the summer congregate off the Devon coast to breed. Provided that only the larger cock fish are landed and the hens are returned to the sea, there is a sustainable fishery there for the taking.
“Years ago the British fishermen were keeping the browns and throwing the spiders back, while the French fishermen were doing the opposite,” says Jarrad. “There’s always been a market for spiders in Europe. Now that market is developing and we would like to see more of them eaten in the UK. They have a beautiful meat, but it’s harder to pick so it takes longer to process and is more expensive.”
Catching and preparing
Anybody may catch crabs for their own consumption. However, it is not lawful to sell your catch unless you are a licensed fisherman. Professional-quality crab pots are readily available. Gael Force Marine in Inverness offers its 24in Easycatch Leisure Creel at £56, complete with bait bag, roped and ready for use. It is covered with 3.5mm black braided netting and its base is made of steel bands.
Pre-stunning before cooking is now widely recommended. Cool the crab down to 2°C or 3°C by wrapping it in a wet cloth or seaweed and then putting it in a freezer or packing crushed ice around it. Once in a torpor it can be humanely killed by spiking it on the underside and thus destroying the main nerve centre. The procedure takes only a few seconds. The crab should then be turned over and the fluid allowed to drain.
Bring to the boil a large pan of salted water. Immerse the crab in it and bring the water back to the boil. Boil for about 20 minutes, then remove the crab and rinse it under cool water. To dress a crab in the traditional manner, pull the legs backwards, remove and set aside. Remove the claws, push forward on the “purse” (the section containing the main body organs, which you will find on the underside) and lift it out of the shell. Remove the gills, or “dead man’s fingers”. Break away the inner shell to expose the brown meat.
Remove this from the outer shell, remove the meat from the purse and reserve. Crack the claws, remove the white ligament and extract the meat with a long, narrowbladed knife. Do the same with the legs. Put the white meat back into one half of the shell and the brown meat into the other. Keep the remains of the legs and purse, along with the shell when you have finished with it. The shell from a 1kg crab is sufficient to make enough heavenly crab bisque for six people.
For tips on cooking with crab and a selection of splendid recipes, visit the Shellfish Association of Great
Britain’s website for its Cooking with crab booklet: www.shellfish.org.uk/cooking-with.html
You can catch crabs for your own consumption but it is not lawful to sell your catch