The Catch

THE CATCH

By Sandra Hildreth

It was 7:30 on a beautiful spring evening. The sun was low on the horizon, turning the clouds bright oranges and purples. Carol sat on the pier, enjoying the view, holding tightly onto the crab line.

She had thrown the line out as far as she could, given the length of the string that held her bait. In the shallow Rehoboth Bay, the 30 foot line usually went out far enough to attract the larger crab instead of the little ones that hide under the pier, or the eels that enjoyed eating the smaller delicacies.

She felt the familiar tug on her line of a crab trying to get to her bait and slowly started to reel the line in, watching the bobber carefully so she would know when the end of the line was close. The pressure of pulling the line in was comforting. The crab still hung onto the bait! She reached for the net when the bobber was about two feet away.

Would the crab be female? Male? A keeper or a throw-back? There was no way to tell until she gingerly lifted the line and quickly swept the net under the bait, hoping against hope the crab wouldn’t scamper away during the lifting operation.

Success! She scooped up the crab with her net, turned it over to check the sex, then measured the shell. A legal-sized male! She turned the net over her bucket, plopped the crab in and laughed as the other keepers started scampering around as much as they could in the bottom of a Home Depot five-gallon bucket.

She added the crab to her mental count. ‘An even dozen. I need at least six more to feed everyone.’

She looked at the quickly disappearing sun. It would be dark soon, and the clouds appeared to be turning much darker than would be in a normal sunset. Living so close to the Atlantic Ocean, Carol knew how quickly storms could form and how dangerous being caught in one could be, but she couldn’t stop now.  To do so would mean there wouldn’t be enough for her and her siblings.

She checked her bait cage. Still enough meat on the chicken neck to attract more crab. Good. She tossed the bait cage out into the bay once more. The familiar quick tug on her wrist where the other end of the string was tied let her know the bait was as far out as possible. She sat down, cross-legged, on the pier once again and waited. Not two minutes later, she tugged lightly and felt resistance. Now for the game! Reel it in, net it, and make sure her catch was a keeper and not have to be throws back

While reeling in her catch, she thought about what her brothers and sisters might be doing. Watching TV? Playing hide-and-seek? Fighting among themselves? She bet herself a dime to a dollar they weren’t doing their homework like she had instructed them to do when she left. In her heart, she knew they wouldn’t. She’d act like she was mad when she got back home, but she really wasn’t. She tried her best to be mother and father to her siblings, but it was hard.

Carol’s eyes teared up, thinking about how much she missed her folks. How could there be a God that could take two people away like that so tragically, leaving her to take care of everything? Sometimes, she hated being 21 and old enough for the court to name her guardian of her siblings, but most of the time she was thankful.

If only. If only her parents could have afforded life insurance, but she couldn’t fault her parents for that. Raising seven children didn’t leave a lot of money for anything much more than the bills and basic necessities. If only the driver of that car wasn’t intoxicated. If only he had been insured. If only…

Carol shook her head hard to get rid of the “if only” thoughts. She had enough worries without thinking too much about things that couldn’t be changed. And worry, she did. About all her siblings. About making sure they each got a college education, clothes on their back and food in their bellies. Most of them were doing pretty much OK. All except Alice. Alice had always been the “apple of her father’s eye,” and still mourned her parent’s death deeply.  Sharing the same bedroom, Carol, too often, heard Alice crying softly into her pillow. Carol would gently get out of her bed, step quietly to her sister’s, slip into the bed and hold her sister safely until she stopped crying and fell asleep again.

Then Carol started thinking about all the things she had to be thankful for: for being in her final semester of earning her bachelor’s, for Mark to have been offered a full-ride football scholarship to Purdue, and for the other five for maintaining all A’s.  

The tug on her line broke into her thoughts. Wow! Must be one of the elusive grandfather crabs. She pulled on the line. Uh, oh. A crab wouldn’t be that hard to pull in. Had she wedged the bait between two rocks? Caught the bait in a tangle of seaweed? A horseshoe crab?

She tugged harder on the line. She watched the bobber slowly come closer. Oh, if only she could see through the muddy waters of the Bay. She picked up the net and stood up. The bobber was directly under her. She grabbed hold of the line as close to the water as she could. It took most of her strength to pull the line up with one hand while positioning the net with the other.

She peered into the water, trying with all her might to see what was on the line. It sure wasn’t a crab! It wasn’t as heavy as a horseshoe crab would have been, but the form was taking shape as she pulled the line closer and closer. It was wide and seemed to be fairly long, but seeing through murky water was tough. Was it one of the sting rays she often saw when crabbing during the daytime? Probably not. That would be too big, too, although she knew it could be a baby one.

She quickly scooped the net as far below the object as she could, hoping to get completely under whatever it was that had taken hold of her bait.

Success! The object was in her net! She grabbed hold of the net with both hands and finished hauling it up to the pier. Oh, my goodness! A huge flounder! She’d always wanted to land one, but she’d never imagined it would be with a crab line and not a fishing line!

She looked at the flounder in the net, then at the bucket. The bucket didn’t look big enough to hold both the crabs and the flounder. Should she dump the crab out of the bucket then stuff the flounder in? No. She couldn’t lose all those crab she’d spent so long catching by hand.

She took the flounder out of the net by its gills and stuffed it into the bucket. With the flounder being flat instead of long and round like most fish, she was able to get the flounder into the bucket, though not with much room to spare. The crabs didn’t like it, but she couldn’t worry about that. She had to get water in the bucket to keep the flounder alive until she made it home. She took the crabbing line off of her wrist, laid it on the pier, and put the crab bucket into the bed of her wagon, the one her mom had bought when they had first moved to Delaware to haul stuff to and from the pier. At seven pounds a gallon, she knew it wouldn’t be able to lift the bucket after it was almost full of water.

She grabbed the bait cooler, climbed down the ladder at the end of the pier and scooped it full of saltwater. After three trips, up and down the ladder, there was enough water in the bucket to keep the flounder alive.  She placed the lid on the bucket, snapped it closed so the water wouldn’t slush too much, put the rest of her gear into the wagon, and started the two block walk back home.

The crabbing pier was thirty-seven feet long. About halfway down, she looked toward the west and saw the clouds part. A short burst of light brightened that part of the sky then disappeared again as the clouds met once more, creating instant darkness. Carol, after witnessing the burst of sunshine, and with a full heart, a bucket of crabs and the first flounder she’d ever caught, picked up her pace to surprise her brothers and sisters with what she was bringing home. “I guess there IS a God after all.”