June 22, 2009.

We’re still here in Annapolis and the weather has finally broken. We were pretty much stuck on the boat for several days. It was either blowing like stink or it was pouring buckets.

On Sunday we finally got off the boat to do a little walking around. We also decided that we better get out and do a little food shopping while we had the chance. We definitely needed some fresh veggies before the onset of scurvy. There’s no grocery store in downtown Annapolis so the trip to the store involved a bus ride.

Instead of walking to the nearest bus stop we did a little walkabout in an effort to loosen up the old legs. It was fortunate that we did because we walked right into an Irish Festival. It was a couple of blocks long and had food, shopping and loads of entertainment. There were Irish step dancers, a kilt wearing Irish rock band and of course the obligatory fife and drum corp, oh, and beer.

The Irish were out in numbers and I even saw my first Irish Wolf Hounds. I had never seen one before and was pretty surprised at just how freaking big they were. Back in the day, before the Irish invented binge drinking, they were a pretty violent people. They often used these huge dogs in battle. Now I understand the whole "kilt thing". You see those bigass dogs headed your way you could probably run a hell of a lot faster unencumbered by pants.

After walking through the festival we were on the bus and off to the grocery store. I’ll spare you the details of the food shopping but it was pretty standard. Lotta isles, lotta stuff, as always, that stuff turns out to be pretty darn heavy, lotta lugging, bus ride, dinghy ride and back to the boat to put it all away.

While putting the groceries away we saw something completely new to us. Mexicans fishing in the wild. Actually, they were crabbing. It’s just that the technique was something that we had never seen before. They would wade out into the water and press a stick firmly into the bottom. They’d tie a string to the top of the stick and a piece of chicken to the other end and throw it into the water.

Then they would walk a short distance away to watch and wait. When a crab would come along and grab the chicken they would try to walk away with it. The string would go taught and the crabbermen would be happy.
They would take their dip net and sneak up to the stick and try to slowly draw the crab in until they could thrust the net upon them. This technique was new to us and very exciting. I watched them crabbing for an hour and then I realized that this new technique was also pretty stupid. They didn’t catch shit. When a crab is in the water, he’s in his element, what are the chances of actually sneaking up on a crab. Every time they’d pull that crab close they would thrust the net into the water and only come up with a piece of chicken tied to a string.

Of course the next day 2 women showed up and tried the very same technique. They also didn’t catch shit. Although, I think they just wanted to spend the day in thigh deep, murky river water chatting about whatever mindless crap, unsuccessful crabberwomen talk about.