On The Coast

Nights out with my honey are not too frequent. They require forethought, careful planning, and strategy. She is a night shift nurse, and balancing work commitments, time to sleep, and together time can be a dance. Last Sunday was the annual holiday concert of a great chorus we admire. We are usually gifted tickets to one of the performances by a close friend who is a member of the chorus. The concert is terrific, but it is also followed by a get-together at my friend’s house. Wow, a concert, a chance to socialize with friends, Christmas time goodwill, and I’m with my love? Great.

The concert was incredible, and the after-concert party was very nice. It was marked, though, by a curious conversation.

Coastal Chat

My friend is a boat builder, and I’ve worked in his boatbuilding shop, and I am, in Coastal English, the “Yaad Cavhah” there ( I get called to do all the carving work). The after concert party always has a selection of members of the chorus, “Boaty” types, family friends, and just interesting persons. Conversations can be interesting.

I walked in, and someone I did not know was talking about crabs in lobster pots. Now my mind is kind of funny, I exclaimed, “Jimmies”! To which he replied “right”! This sparked a discussion of crabs( sometimes called Jimmies), Lobstermen, New England fisheries history, and “bycatch” ( stuff that winds up in your traps or nets that shouldn’t be there).

What sort of esoterica is going on here? Well, when I was living in coastal Maine during the sixties and for a while in the seventies. Crabs were just starting to show up in local lobstermen’s traps ( lobster pots). In what may have been an early indication of climate change, the blue crab was migrating into New England waters.

The lobsterman I was working for as a “stern man” at that time was just throwing them back in the water as trash. I explained to him that in the Chesapeake Bay area, they were called Blue Jimmies, and you could pay good money for them. Looking at me like I might be a mad bomber, he cautiously asked me for what? Eating, I replied. He considered this briefly, then finished tossing the crab over the side with a comment that the “Coop ovah to the habaah won’t buy them, so it’s trash!”

Bycatch Cuisine

Our conversation continued with several folks chiming in that things had indeed changed with this tasty bit of bycatch now included in local cuisine. Then the conversation shifted to other types of bycatch. Tasty cod. Cod sometimes winds up in the traps, too. We then spent time discussing how you could cook a tasty cod on the muffler pipe of your lobster boat. One friend of mine used aluminum foil, butter, and chopped veggies to cook a delicious treat while we were pulling pots. Someone else chimed in that a friend of theirs had a smoker on the boat for that purpose.

Heading Home

My wife had been looking at me in a curious fashion during this conversation. She knows about my times on the coast. But doesn’t frequently run into me in full “coastal boy mode”. On the way home, she noted that during the conversation, my accent had shifted, and I was using many words she didn’t know.

I had a good time, and it’s fun to occasionally surprise my love of over forty years with things she didn’t know about me.