An Outbreak of Crabs

Krissy went to the island of Emae this week. Emae is island blong crab,

i.e. This place is overflowing with crabs.

So Krissy being the considerate and loving wife she is decided to get a bunch of them for me to eat. She brought them back on the plane in a custom basket made of leaves and twigs. It was a beautiful basket and amazingly contained over 15 of these large crabs.

When she got home I put a big pot of water on the stove and got it boiling.

I opened the basket and the crabs all freaked out, snapping their big ass pinchers at me. I decided the best way to get them out of there and into the boiling water was to put on my baseball mitt and use a long wooden spoon to force them into it.

Surprisingly this worked really well.

I got five crabs in the boiling water and started salivating.

I re-fastened the basket the rest were in with clothes pins, but did not re-tie it with twine as I found it. Big mistake.

After eating two of the cooked crabs and cutting my fingers trying to open them, I decided while they tasted great, they were more trouble then they were worth. So I put the rest in the fridge as it was already 10pm and I was tired. My plan was to give the rest away to our host family and my counterpart at the Ministry of Health.

I took a shower, and went to sleep. At 1am I awoke to Krissy turning on all the lights in the house and shouting for me. I came out and all 15 of the crabs had organized a prison break. They attacked the clothespins holding their prison shut and scattered all over the house.

So in the middle of the night I put on some shoes, donned my baseball glove and grabbed a wooden spoon. I then proceeded to track down the crabs which had paired off and gone into hiding at various locations throughout the house: Behind the fridge, behind the stove, underneath the bed, inside the baseball equipment big, behind a big dresser, behind the gas tank. One by one I grabbed them all with the glove and placed them in various containers. I couldn't get them all back in their original home. By the end I had two buckets, a pot, a basket, and two cardboard boxes each with two or three crabs scrambling around inside.

Amazingly neither I nor our puscat or her kitten lost any fingers/limbs in this wonderful little adventure.

Mind you I've shaken many hands that were missing fingers lost to crabs, so I was very aware of this possibility. Ahway Vanuatu.