Beaufort’s cherished blue crab is ‘mean as hell.’ But crabbers love catching them

Beaufort native Brett Everett races across the glassy surface of the Morgan River in a 22-foot boat on a muggy 71-degree morning, using the Lowcountry waterway to drive deep into the salt marshes. But Everett and his crew, William Beveride and "Lucky" Alewine, aren't out on the river for a pleasure cruise. For the next several hours, they will sweat and grunt as they strain to pull dozens of metal cages from the water hoping they will be filled with Atlantic blue crab. Known for their sweet flavor and brilliant blue claws, the blue crab is a Lowcountry treasure that's in high demand up and down the East Coast. If only their demeanor was as pleasant as its flaky white meat after being steamed and dipped in butter.

"They're a delicacy," says Everett, a St. Helena Island-based commercial crab fisherman, "but they're mean as hell."

South Carolina's coastlines are dominated by vast salt marshes with dense stands of smooth cordgrass and oyster reefs drenched twice daily by tides up to 8 feet. It is a perfect habitat for delicious blue crab, that hide in the grass feeding on oysters, clams and snails — anything they can get their vicious claws on. Sometimes, the cantankerous crustaceans burrow into the mud with only their beady "eye stalks" visible lying in wait for a passing meal. But if they're not careful, the crabs, an important link in the food chain, will become a meal themselves for birds and fish — or caught by crabbers like Everett.

"Its a very important fishery economically speaking but also culturally," says Ben Dyar, director of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources' Office of Fisheries Management.

Each year, some 3 million pounds of blue crab are harvested from coastal South Carolina, with the largest numbers landed by commercial fishermen like Everett with smaller amounts taken by recreational crabbers fishing from shore or docks.

But major changes are coming to the state's $6 million blue crab fishery, the state's third largest behind shrimp and finfish. After a decades-long decline in numbers and little regulation, the state 2024 Legislature decided to license and place pot restrictions on both commercial and recreational crabbing.

Everett, who has been crabbing his whole life, is worried about the effect of the pot-limit cap on Rusty Crabs , a business he built step by step with sweat equity and his own wits and skills. The business, named after the rust-colored bellies of mature crabs filled with meat, now has four boats that are used to check some 200 pots daily. Everett enjoys the work and he's good at it.

"Now they are changing the laws on me and it's going to hurt," says Everett, who worries that the cap will force him to sell some of his boats or find another use for them in another fishery.

For its part, the SCDNR says the changes are meant to ensure the long-term survival of the blue crab fishery, which the agency says has been largely unregulated. Shortages of crabs in the mid-Atlantic states, it adds, have driven up prices and increased harvest pressure in South Carolina even as harvests are declining.

Crabbing is his calling

Everett, who first learned how to crab from his father, has been working the creeks and estuaries of this area since 1995 when he bought his first commercial fishing license. On his first day fishing for blue crab, he said, he earned the equivalent of two weeks of pay working in a grocery store meat department. He never looked back.

Crabbing takes a diverse set of skills, he says, from building boats and traps to fixing motors to catching bait, which can be expensive to buy on the open market.

He sells his catch to the owners of roadside stands and food trucks and direct to customers through Facebook advertising. The online marketing, he says, "basically has saved us." Later this fall, large quantities of Rusty Crabs' catch will head north to Maryland, a blue crab hotbed, which turns to the Lowcountry to fill its market needs when the season there closes.

Working on water outweighs pitfalls

Strategically located crab pots on the muddy creek bottoms, stuffed with smelly bait fish, trap the 6-legged crabs who also have rear swimming legs that look like paddles. The crabs, which walk sideways or backward, also find protection in the tall grass lining the creeks.

"Let's go baby!" Beveride, one of Everett's crew members, says when the boat comes upon the first set of pots on a recent day of crabbing. "Smells like money."

The crew launched from Eddings Point into the Jenkins Creek and eventually the Morgan River. But the work had already begun before sunrise when the crew readied the boat at Everett's St. Helena Island home as roosters crowed.

Beveride, a New Mexico native, started working for Rusty Crabs four years ago at first part-time. But when the his gig as a motorcycle technician was lost when the company closed, he became a full-time crabber.

"It's much better," Beveride says. "I don't have to deal with people. I'd much rather be out on the water."

The job of catching critters that bite and live in the wild and woolly marshlands tends to attract a certain type — independent minded with varied skills who don't mind the difficult work because of the solitude and beauty of the workplace on the edge of Atlantic Ocean.

Everett looks ahead into a channel where white buoys extend into the distance, marking the location of pots under the surface waiting to be pulled.

"I figured I could find a market and not have to get a real job," he says of his decision to become a commercial crab fisherman. "I don't want to do anything else."

Teamwork makes the dream work

But these days, at 51, he recognizes he can't do this physical job alone.

"Teamwork makes the dream work!" the enthusiastic captain, who seems to have a saying for every situation, says as the boat rips down the river.

Everett checks 200 traps daily, sometimes hauling in as many as 10 bushels of blue crab. A single bushel can hold between two and six dozen crab depending on their size. Business is slower now but it will pick up shortly when Maryland buyers comes calling, Everett says. "We'll make money then," he says, "right now we're squeezing by trying to pay the bills."

Crew members stand for six to seven hours, working in the sun and hoisting and shaking crab pots and sorting the catch and loading traps with menhaden, a bait fish, hoping for the best and expecting the worst.

It's a world apart from the traffic jams and hustle on the land just a stone's throw away, with the only commotion coming from redfish thrashing near the spartina grass lining the river channels like guard rails.

"There's a difference between hard work on water," says Alewine, another crew member, "and hard work on land."

Alewine, a Georgia native who drove a tow truck for 14 years, fell in love with the South Carolina Lowcountry during a vacation and now returns each year to work during the crabbing season with Rusty Crabs.

Newbies must overcome fear of the claw

Everett pushes a lever and a hydraulic "puller" whines and a pot tied to a 40-foot rope soon appears at the side of the boat. Beveride hoists the cage out of the water and shakes it to loosen the crabs which fall into a plastic tub.

"Love seeing them blue crab," says Everett.

After the cage is unloaded, and before it is returned to the water, Everett cleans the buoy with a scrub brush. Meanwhile, Alwine brushes seaweed and mud from the cage. Cleanliness is important because the cages are filled with food that people will eat, Everett says.

When the tub of crab fills up, Alewine, his hands covered in thick rubber gloves, begins the job of sorting the crab by size and quality. To legally keep a crab, it must measure 5 inches between two points on each side of their shells. Alewine also presses their underside to check for firmness. The firmer the crab, the more meat it has inside. He drops mature crabs with more meat into a wooden basket. Smaller crabs are tossed overboard.

"Ahhh!" Alewine exclaims suddenly as a crab latches onto his rubber-gloved hand.

For newbies, one of the most difficult parts of learning the ropes is overcoming the fear of getting pinched.

Everett, mimicking the motion of a hand digging into a tub teeming with crab, often tells them, "Man, you gotta get in there."

Harvest restrictions loom

Declines in blue crab, mainly occurring in the fall at the height of the commercial harvest, have been documented since the late 1990s, according to the SCDNR . The same decline has been reported in the neighboring states of North Carolina and Georgia. While the SCDNR is studying a range of possible causes, from parasites to invasive blue catfish and increasing human pressures such as stormwater runoff, one of the main suspects is a shift from colder waters to warmer and drier conditions, the SCDNR's Dyar says.

New regulations for both commercial and recreational crabbers are meant to address the sustainability of the crab fishery and improve the accuracy of harvest estimates, he says.

Today, most commercial licensed crabbers either don't participate in the fishery, even though they have a license, or fail to report their catch, according to the SCDNR.

"Given that annual landings have been at or near 50-year record lows for the last few years, the unrealized potential of licensed gear that is not being tracked in the fishery could have significant impacts on South Carolina's blue crab resource and further reduce already low landings," the SCDNR said in a r eport to the Legislature .

The state has placed a moratorium on new commercial licenses and, beginning next July, will only issue licenses to crabbers who can verify they've caught at least 500 pounds in recent years

Going forward, the state also will cap the number of pots that can be used to either 200 or the average number of pots used in the three previous years, which ever is greater.

Everett, who has 500 pots in total, thinks part of the problem with the fishery is that some crabbers are not documenting what they catch and selling crabs under the table.

"There are crabs, but everybody is pulling them out of the water and selling them out of their front yards," he says.

In addition, beginning next year, recreational crabbers will face a limit of one bushel of crabs per person per day or two bushels per boat. Previously, there was no recreational harvest limit. Recreational crabbers may also purchase an enhanced recreational crab trap "endorsement" to fish up to five crab pots.

Favorite color is blue

As the day comes to a close, the Rusty Crabbs crew members, like a crab shedding its jacket, remove rubber waders and hold them over the side to catch the spray from the boat to wash away the smell and slime before hanging them from the roof to dry in the wind as they make their way home.

Back at home base, six baskets of fresh crab are unloaded from the boat into refrigerator units. One customer, John Pierce, is already waiting to buy two bushels of blue crab he plans to sell at a road-side stand in Walterboro called Lowtide Seafood .

"They eat the crab more than they eat the shrimp," Pierce says of blue crab, his best-selling seafood.

Blue crab from Everett, he says, includes only mature crabs as opposed to "white bellies" — younger crab that are smaller. Everett's strictness about taking only larger mature crabs keeps Pierce coming back. "He's the best," says Pierce. "He grades his crab differently than anybody."

For lunch, Everett fires up a steam pot and stuffs it with crab, covers the shellfish with seasoning and places a brick on the top. He notes that people these days don't know where their food comes from. About 12 minutes later, the crew is cracking claws and pulling out fresh crab meat and dipping it in butter.