Crab savvy: catch them, keep them alive and bait them up.

Live crabs are one of my favorite baits during the summer. When you cast one ahead of a school of tarpon and feel the "boink," you know it's not going to be a jack, bonito, barracuda or some other non-target species.

It might not be a tarpon, either. But if it isn't, it's likely to be a permit, cobia or mutton snapper. I'll take any of those options.

The main downside to using crabs for bait is that they require a lot more effort to acquire and keep alive than your average baitfish. For crabs (blue crabs or pass crabs) you need to focus your effort on catching enough bait for the day, and that can take away from your fishing time, so I like to catch enough for several outings and keep them alive until use.

Most crabs are nocturnal feeders that utilize the tides for their main means of locomotion. To catch crabs from land, you'll want to look for the last few hours of an outgoing tide near dawn or dusk, when the crabs will be actively hunting the shorelines. Crabs like sandy shorelines with grass or seaweed along the water line. The sand allows them to burrow to escape detection from predators while the grass tends to catch or tangle the decaying fish and plant matter that crabs feed upon. If the tides are higher than you'd like, look around areas of spartina grass or mangrove roots where the crabs like to venture on high water.

Catching crabs by boat is often a lot easier, as the crustaceans utilize the currents and floating grass to move from one area to another. These pushes of crabs are typically better after dark and on the new and full moons.

When hunting crabs floating on the surface, look for areas near inlets or around bridges with good water flow where the currents abut and form a seam that collects the majority of the floating grass. Often that will be a 10-to 20-yard wide stretch of current flow with mats of grass. Grab a long-handled dip net, and position your boat alongside the grass and watch for the crabs flowing through. It may take a few hours into the moving tides for the larger concentrations of crabs to move. Dip them up and put them into a bucket for declawing.

I know some guides that don't declaw their crabs because they feel it keeps them more natural looking, but as often as I reach into a livewell blindly while keeping my eye on fish, I'm not willing to give the crabs a fighting chance. For prolonged storage, removing the claws also keeps the crabs from fighting and killing the weak.

Declawing crabs is simple. Blue crabs and pass crabs have the ability to autotomise or "drop" their claws as a defense mechanism when grabbed by predators. If you simply twist the claw off, you'll likely injure the socket and kill the crab. Instead, use a pair of pliers to grasp the claw of a crab in the elbow joint and then squeeze. When the pressure gets intense, the crab will release the claw. Repeat for the other claw. Once declawed, you can toss them in a bucket with about an inch of water or livewell (many livewells come with short, 2-inch crustacean standpipes) for short-term storage.

If storing live crabs for prolonged periods, you can keep them in a five-gallon bucket with about an inch of water in it (crabs can breathe air, so they need to be able to lift their faces out of the water) stored in a cool, dry location. Better yet, is to have a portable aerator with air stone supplementing the oxygen in the water.

You can always keep your live crabs in a pen or large bait bucket if you have water access. These storage containers allow you to feed the crabs, which you can easily do by saving the leftover baitfish or shrimp from your fishing trips and putting them in with the crabs. If you don't feed them, they will die or resort to cannibalism much like shrimp.

If you're looking to keep crabs for a couple of days, you can also use a cooler with a layer of ice on the bottom, then a layer of cardboard followed by a layer of newspaper or seaweed soaked in salt water. Place the crabs on top and make sure they never come in contact with the ice or any freshwater on the bottom of the container, as it will kill them. The ideal temperature in the cooler should be between 50 and 60 degrees.

Dead crabs should be saved in a plastic freezer bag. You can use them later for chum or, if the fish are really fired up, as bait. Pompano, redfish and sheepshead are just a few of the inshore species which relish crabs.

Blue Crab 101

Blue crabs are the most common bait crab found in Florida waters. They have a carapace that's twice as long as it is wide with sharp points on the end, along with 10 jointed legs (two daws, six walking legs and two rear paddles) that have the ability to drop at any time if grabbed by a predator.

The male blue crabs are the larger of the species and they prefer a low salinity/brackish water environment. The females like higher salinities, but will move into brackish water to spawn. When not displaying an obvious belly-anchored egg sac, female blue crabs are easily distinguished from males by the red or orange tips to their daws.

During the spring and summer months, blue crabs move into the shallows and offshore. In the winter, they move to deeper water and often burrow in the mud. They're also more sedentary in cool weather, thus they tend not to eat much and are slimmer than in the summer months.

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Title Annotation:	FS SEMINAR: INSHORE
Author:	Holliday, Mike
Publication:	Florida Sportsman
Date:	Jul 1, 2014
Words:	981
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