With my friends and family, when I was a kid, we did a lot of crabbing and I loved it. All blue crabs as you described. actually preferred crabbing over the boring fresh water fishing trips that my dad drug me along on.

In my town the men would play cards, smoke Luckys and drink beer.

Never a dull moment in crabbing. As you wrote you can catch them on a line, in traps or with nets. Grab them by the back fins to avoid the claws.

I enjoyed soft shelling for the socializing but I didn't have much luck finding them. I was more likely to gig a couple of flounder.

I also enjoyed shrimping. Throw out the net, troll for an hour or so and pull it in, Every pull was like a mystery package. You hoped the net was full of shrimp but as often as not there would be more baby flounder, croakers, salt water catfish, a few crabs, than decent sized shrimp. So, you clean the net, throw it out again and repeat. Do it 5-6 times and you wind up with 25-30 lbs of white and yellow shrimp on a bad night. Makes a nice keg party but not enough to sell.

Gruesome story about crabbing in my home town. In the mid fifties, two airliners collided mid air over Mobile Bay, killing all aboard. The bodies were scattered all over the bay.

Crabbing was closed for about a year after the crash due to the unrecoverable bodies.