THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9605310229
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 38 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: 64 lines
The soft-shell crabs that Mark Tate pulls out of the Roanoke Sound may wind up in the fanciest restaurants in the world, as far away as Japan.
They've become a delicacy for folks who can afford the very best, a new entry in the international cuisine cookbook.
People in Paris or New York or Tokyo who munch on the crisp crustaceans in lavish surroundings might be surprised to see how they're caught.
Probably not even the summer visitors on the Outer Banks are aware of what Mark Tate's doing when they see his little boat bobbing on the waves north of the causeway between Nags Head and Manteo.
The 37-year-old waterman is running his pots, about 115 chicken-wire cages 2 1/2 feet long, wide and deep. He sets them in the shallow waters of the sound, about 50 yards apart, with a line from the pot to a round red marker so they can be found when he pulls them up every other day.
Four funnel-like openings let the crabs in - but keep them from getting out. The creatures, in the process of shedding their shells for new and larger body casings, seek the pots for safety from other crabs and fish who find them easy pickings when their new shells have not yet hardened.
Tate, a crabber off and on for 30 years, wastes nary a motion as he pulls a pot, throws back the non-shedders, saves in the appropriate baskets the soft-shells, the peelers and the busters (in the process of shedding) and returns the empty pot to the sound just in time to pull in another.
``You can read a crab by looking at its back flippers'' to know what you've caught, he says. He's on the water by sunrise, and heads back to the dock before 10 a.m., content with his catch and with his life. His boat is an open, homemade, wooden, flat-bottom, 14-foot vessel that leaks a lot and never merited a name. It's powered by a 25-horsepower outboard. Both are about 25 years old.
``The motor always starts on the second pull,'' proudly points out Tate, who puts the busters and some of the peelers in concrete holding tanks at the family shedding operation on Pond Island by the causeway. He boxes the peelers and the softshells and drives them to Endurance Seafood in Colington. Peelers - ready for somebody to hold in water until they shed and become soft - bring between 40 and 50 cents each. Softshells are worth 75 cents to a dollar each.
Tate's haul this day is about 100 peelers and 30 softshells, half his catch of a week ago. The season is waning, and soon he'll switch to other types of fishing.
The Manteo resident is one of the hundreds of part-time watermen on the Carolina coast who fear the government may drive them off the water by refusing to license anyone who doesn't make a majority of his income from fishing.
A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., Tate for a decade was executive chef of the Ramada Inn at Kill Devil Hills and now is business agent for his mother, famed children's book author Suzanne Tate.
But Mark grew up on Pond Island, where his folks have lived for more than 35 years. His dad, Everett Tate, and their ancestors all worked the waters of the Outer Banks.
Mark hopes the people trying to protect the supply of seafood for the future can do their job without forcing part-timers or their retired fathers or their young sons off the water.
His plea is very understandable when you've spent the morning in a small boat warmed by a rising sun, harvesting nature's bounty in a manner much like that used by watermen who left the sea to follow a Nazarene carpenter 2,000 years ago. by CNB