A Guide to Spanner Crabbing – By Gyula Vari
Spanner Crabs! I would have to say this is my favourite crab to eat with its beautiful white delicate sweet flesh, and the ease of catching a decent feed with little effort puts the spanner crab on the top of my list. Now don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy a nice feed of mud crab or sand crab, but, let me explain why the spanner crab is my favourite of all our local crabs.
Easy work in 60m depth with the pot hauler
Most recreational fishers don’t target them, as most of us put them in the too hard basket. I most certainly did for a lot of my fishing years, and not realising that for most of our offshore fishing expeditions, we were running over prime spanner crab territory. For a long time, I spoke about maybe giving it a go, but that didn’t eventuate until about fifteen years ago. I pulled the trigger and invested in some spanner crabbing gear and haven’t looked back since, what a great investment that was!
A few things you should know about Spanner Crabs, also referred to as Frog Crabs first though. Best time of year to target them is in the cooler months, April to October, however, they can be caught all year round along the east coast of Queensland, Northern NSW and parts of WA. There is a yearly closure in place for Queensland, and at the time of writing this article, the closure is from 1st November to the 15th of December. Minimum size limit for spanner crabs is ten centimetres from centre spine to mid carapace base (head to tail base) with a possession limit of twenty per person. Females are a no take.They live to fifteen years, which is a lot for a crab, interestingly they walk forwards and backwards, not side to side like other crabs, and are red in colour, so they look like they are already cooked! -often at boat ramps people ask us if we cooked them onboard. They lay buried in the sand waiting in ambush for a feed and inhabit depths from ten metres to one hundred metres or more.
Typical haul of Spanner Crabs
To get yourself started and set up, you will need a few things. Firstly, pots or dillies, now without being technical, I call them pots which may not be the correct terminology, but for arguments sake, they are a one metre by one metre flat square mesh. These aren’t available in all fishing tackle stores, but there are a few specialty crabbing gear guys around that will help you out, you will find them on the net, no pun intended.
The second thing you will need is rope, and plenty of it! Most of my spanner crabbing is in 50-60m depth, so I generally run 80-100m of rope per pot allowing for current. Don’t leave your rope too short, if the pots drift into deeper water you will lose them. And thirdly, some floats. Make sure you invest in the larger ones, as the standard 150mm round floats will easily become non-visible and hard to locate, especially if there is a bit of a swell or chop on the water. In Queensland you are allowed four pots per person, in fifteen years of spanner crabbing, I have never deployed more than four pots, irrespective of the number of crew on board. There simply hasn’t been a need.
Carefully removing them from the pots to minimise damage to the crabs
Now that you are set up and have all your gear ready to go, it is just a matter of finding the crabs. But where do you start? There is a lot of Ocean out there with a sandy seabed, right? Good news is, they are not too hard to find, and if you fish offshore regularly, like myself, you have been driving over some fantastic spanner crabbing ground to get to your favourite fishing spots.
I tend to look for sand and the change in water depth, so a good distinctive drop off is a good place to start. Most late model GPS units have good accurate contour lines, change in depth shading and sandy areas noted on the charts, so you can mark some areas worth investigating the day before your trip. One important thing I want to mention is that all my spanner crabbing is done on a return trip from a fishing session, so the crabs are always an added bonus to top of a good fishing trip. There is absolutely no need to leave the pots on your way out to your fishing session for hours on end, and run the risk of losing the pots to currents or other boats potentially running them over. So once you have selected an area, bait the pots, in the centre of the pot as you would with sand or mud crabs. Bait them with good quality bait like fresh mullet or fish frames from a recent trip, and deploy the pots. Spacing the pots about 500m apart will give you good coverage.
Soak time!! If you have placed your pots in a productive area, it won’t take long for the spanner crabs to find the baits as they are ferocious feeders, especially after moulting. Forty-five minutes to an hour is about all it takes, any longer than that won’t make a difference as the crabs are either in the area or not. As they say, there is no point flogging a dead horse. Now for the painful yet somehow satisfying part of collecting the pots and pulling in a hundred metres of rope with the anticipation of some crabs! You will feel those arms burn, especially if you have a good pot full of crabs.
If you have been successful in picking a good area, one soak with four pots will generally yield thirty to forty legal sized crabs!
On the other hand, if you lucked out, it only takes a kilometre or two to find the crabs in most cases. Bit of a tip, if you are in the right area, you will have sand particles in the bait mesh bags.
Once you have located a productive area, mark this for future crabbing. Keep in mind these crabs are always on the move, so it may be necessary to move a few hundred metres to a kilometre or so from previously successful trips, but they are generally never too far away.
Checking to make sure they are male and legal – these were good!
When releasing undersized crabs, handle them with care, it can be a very tedious exercise to untangle them from the pots and it will most certainly test your patience, but breaking limbs off these crabs greatly increases their mortality rate. Scientific studies indicate up to an eighty five percent increase in mortality if the limbs are broken off, so ensuring they go back unharmed gives them a better chance of survival.
You can cheat! I recently upgraded from manually pulling the pots in by hand to a Kristal XL90 Canarie pot hauler system. As fun and exciting as it is pulling them in by hand, the pot hauler system is so much easier and more convenient. Rope diameter has been reduced from ten millimetres to 2.5mm. The 10mm is required to be able to grip the rope and avoid rope burn or blisters on your hands, the pot hauler houses 400m of 2.5mm rope on two spools which are a quick and easy interchange. The added advantage of the lower rope diameter is less drag which equals less pot drift. Kristal also have great accessories like their big yellow inflatable buoys which are much more visible and easy storage when not in use as they conveniently fold up. If you are keen to investigate into this equipment or full ready to go packages, check them out at seamonkeymarine.com.au
Kristal XL90 Canarie hauling in the pots
Hopefully you have a good feed of crab onboard, but what to do with them now? I generally cool or ice them down enough to put them to sleep, but don’t over-do this process, as you don’t want them too cold. You want the boiling water to remain boiling once the crabs are added to the pot. A high-pressure gas burner is also a good investment if you do this often and makes this process easier and the cooking timing more accurate. The trickiest part with Spanner Crabs is the cooking time, they are already red, so unfortunately you can’t use colour change during the cooking process as an indicator. Having said this though, you will notice the red becomes a lot more vivid and rich in colour. However, this alone isn’t enough to determine if they are over or under cooked. Over the years of experimenting and learning myself, I can tell you that twelve minutes for ten crabs in a pot is the ideal time, or, when you see the carapace at the tail end of the crab just start to lift and separate from the rest of its body.
Cooked and ready to enjoy!
Also, there is the forever debate of adding salt to the cooking water or not. I generally don’t add salt to the cooking water, water with salt has a higher boiling point and lowers the waters specific heat. The crabs have enough salt in them, and I have found just plain fresh water doesn’t affect the saltiness of the crabs. As for the ice slurry though, I recommend adding some salt! Not adding salt in the cooling process will most certainly wash away some of the saltiness from the meat. Minimise the slurry time to the bear minimum. As soon as they are cool and the cooking process has stopped, remove them from the slurry! Another tip, use a high ice vs water mix for the slurry.
The flesh is white, almost always the crabs are full of meat, they are firm and sweet, if you have got the cooking process correct, the meat will fall away from the shell and hard cartilages with little effort. If you have never had them, or had them freshly caught and cooked them yourself, the best way I can describe the Spanner Crab is a cross between a Bug and Sand Crab! Absolutely delicious and easy to catch. A fantastic compliment to finish a successful fishing trip with little effort required to catch a feed. Give them a go!! I highly recommend them.
