The European green crab has quite the reputation. They’re smart ... in a dangerous way. They’re voracious, predatory and they eat their young!
These harsh assessments were offered up recently by the Martha’s Vineyard shellfish constable and others to our Mindy Todd here on WCAI. They were talking about the new documentary One Bad Crab, and how the hardy invader devours juvenile oysters, clams, mussels and other lucrative fisheries.
Commercial fisherman Jamie Bassett says he one hundred percent agrees with all that. The green crab is a war machine, he told me when we met recently at his office on the Chatham Fish Pier.
Except here’s the thing, Bassett does not want to gear up for battle or buck the invasion. He’s one of the few who harvests the green crab to make a buck.
The 54-year-old has made his living seizing on what others discredit or ignore. He has a kelp farm, that’s seaweed of course. He’s also into horseshoe crabs, a bounty of bluebloods for biomedicine that I always saw as wash-ashore trash. And his business on the town pier, Shellfish Broker, takes in mainly skate and dogfish, not exactly menu toppers at local eateries.
Bassetts said he chose these enterprises by necessity. He’s a Colby grad with a degree in French lit. and a specialty in theater of absurd. ``It’s really done me a lot of good,’’ he says with a wide grin. After school, he traveled the world as a photographer’s assistant and then on his own before coming back to Chatham to give fishing a try. The barriers to entry were formidable. He was told a lobster permit would cost 800,000 dollars. A groundfish permit? One for quahogs? Both out of reach for a guy starting out.
So, in 2015, he hit the ocean currents less navigated, and bought the green-crab pots of the man he calls the green-crab master, Chatham’s Nick Nickerson. It was risky. Given the threat the crab posed to the livelihood of other fishermen, Bassett worried his pots might be sliced and diced. They weren’t. Instead, his colleagues seem to sense he was helping take a problem of theirs away.
The green crab is not as meaty as other crabs. With its hard carapace, it’s used mostly for stock and a flavor enhancer for soups and sauces. Still, Bassett did well enough in that first year to get by, as his other ventures began paying off. Today Shellfish Broker employs fifteen people in season and, last year, off-loaded three million pounds of fish.
The green crabs wouldn’t get his full attention since those early days until now, as he lays out plans for expanding that business. He will hire two fishermen to collect the crabs and, instead of them going to market right away, the crabs will be put into holding tanks at Shellfish Broker. And he’ll wait until they molt. Their armor shed, the crabs become known as softshells or quite edible, and those he’ll deliver directly to chefs on the Cape’s high-end, fine-dining circuit.
Sauteed in olive oil and paired with a nice Chardonnay, he says, they’re light to the touch but dense and flavorful.
Fishermen, Bassett says, are a secretive bunch. Their credo: Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. He already has buyers lined up, but won’t say who. He has 60 green-crab pots but won’t say where he puts them. Won’t say what he uses for bait. Plus he checks the pots only after sunset, lest others see where they are.
What I do know is that Jamie Bassett is a surefire glass-half-full entrepreneur. Where others see pestilence in this ten-legged coastal menace, he sees opportunity.
I like to think of myself as an adventurous gourmand. Count me in for giving it a try.
