We have checked into a caravan park opposite the water and the jetty. Here there is crab memorabilia everywhere and a huge crab cooking pot in the middle of the van park. We chose to come here because I overheard two ladies having a chat about this place in the loo at Streaky Bay. One said they caught as many as 36 crabs in one day off the jetty. We've never been crabbing before but we were keen to try it out, here and now.
We set up the van, hired some crab pots and then we were off to catch some crabs for ourselves.
The walk to the end of the jetty seemed to take forever. The jetty is 1676m long and it is the longest timber jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. The toilets are situated at the start of the jetty. So its just over a 3km round trip to the loo. Waz and the girls only had to do the trip once. Lucky Lilly is still in nappies and I kept my drinking to a minimum to avoid the marathon hike.
Port Germein Jetty (photo courtesy of the internet)
Port Germein was the first port in Australia and it is where all the tall ships would sail and dock at. An old highset house across the road from it was once a saloon and a brothel, frequented by many sailors in the past. Now it is someones house.
We are on the hunt for shitters, which is a slang name used for this particular bait used to catch crabs. So the girls each throw a line in hoping to catch some. The van park owner had given us a couple of shitters to get us started.
Here shitter shitters
Within minutes of sinking our pots we started to catch crabs but many were too small and had to be returned to the water.
Lilly's catch cry for the day was "don't eat me crab".
One of the locals attached this shitter to Lilly's rod while she wasn't looking and everyone looked on and enjoyed watching the look on her face when she reeled it in. Priceless. There were lots of woohoos from her.
A huge stingray was hanging around the jetty causing the crabs to hide in the sand instead of crawling into our pots. While this stingray was close by our pots would come up empty. Every now and then it would disappear and crabs started appearing again.
Definately a keeper
These aren't
but this one is.
We eventually did manage to catch 4 good size crabs but had to stop crabbing because a huge storm was on its way in.
The van park owner had already given us the heads up on this storm so we were prepared to take off as soon as we saw sign of it coming our way.
The storm was getting close so we quickly packed up and took off home but unfortunately it hit before we got to the end of the jetty. Luckily we managed to get back to the van before the wind and the rain really hit hard.
In the camp kitchen we enjoyed our catch of blue swimmer crabs as a post dinner entree. Very delicious.
We had such a good day. A standout memory for me.
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