Forum members provide take-a-break gift to Chip!
Ken Gracey
Posts: 7,386
Hello,
I've received some PayPal money from these forum members (edited for anonymity):
Person abc $50
Person def $20
Person ghi $20
Person jkl $20
I will be transmitting this $110 to Chip so he can take his big family (five children) out to dinner or for some other special purpose he might have in mind.
The forum members are thanking him for his continued work on Propeller 2 and hope to see him take a break over the Christmas holiday!
Thanks guys, and pleased to help -
Ken Gracey
I've received some PayPal money from these forum members (edited for anonymity):
Person abc $50
Person def $20
Person ghi $20
Person jkl $20
I will be transmitting this $110 to Chip so he can take his big family (five children) out to dinner or for some other special purpose he might have in mind.
The forum members are thanking him for his continued work on Propeller 2 and hope to see him take a break over the Christmas holiday!
Thanks guys, and pleased to help -
Ken Gracey
Comments
I'll do something good with your gift and then report back. Thanks a lot for your kindness.
Person mno $110
Person pqr $35
Chip, with these additional contributions you could do something out of the ordinary, like taking the family to the coast for the weekend.
Ken Gracey
I hope you're having a wonderful holiday and will come back refreshed after your time off!
David
The Chip Fund took in some British Quid and Ozzie Bucks over the last couple of days, so it sits somewhere around $300. Now there's certainly enough to take a trip to the coast for the weekend.
As soon as Chip sends me his PayPal address I'll transfer it all over. In the meantime, I'm enjoying collecting the interest on his fun funds.
Ken Gracey
It was 8 hours of driving there and back, and I want to go again soon when there's another daylight low tide. I had never done anything like that before. Charles liked being with his friends, but wasn't so into the work of prying, digging, and trudging through muddy swamps that vacuum-trap your heels with every step - you need to walk on your toes. He got water into his waders, so he had to change at the end of the day.
At first, we went to find some mussels. Ray took us to a rocky slope at the end of an isthmus. The tide was already out pretty far. At first we (not including Ray) couldn't see any mussels, but once we realized what we were looking at, we could see them everywhere among the rocks. They were huge! These mussels were over a pound each. Here is a picture of the boys, with Charles on the right, holding some mussels:
After that, we went to another part of the bay where the receding tide had left a huge muddy field where some old pier pilings went way out into the bay. Ray ran out there and started catching crabs, tossing them from mud holes onto the swamp surface where we could get them into buckets. We were also digging up horse neck clams in this area. That was something new. Here is a video I found that shows what this is all about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re_n8jMsynE
When the tide goes out, you look for mud patterns indicating holes underneath. These holes can fit two fingers, and you just follow them down, digging mud as you go. You eventually feel a fleshy nub which is the retracted neck of the clam, sticking about 1" out of it's shell. As you dig the mud around the clam's shell, you can finally wiggle it free and pull it out. These things were a little beyond elbow depth. We battered and fried them last night and they were really good.
Here is a picture from the end of the day:
Those crabs are like little kids that fight for no reason. Notice that one's main claw is missing? Some other crab was certainly holding on to it, without any plan of what to do with it. Mine!!!
I was up until 2am cooking those crabs outside. It's amazing that something so mild-tasting can come out of that methane mud swamp.
Thanks, all you guys, for your generosity. This was good inspiration and impetus from you to do something new and interesting. I love seafood, and our kids are developing a taste for it, too. My wife is not so interested and is a little disgusted that the garage smells like the ocean, still. We'll probably clean it later today. We've still got a bunch of mussels to cook.
Looks like you all had a blast.
Crabs fighting like kids sounds familiar somehow. I've been told that you can put 2 crabs in a box, and they won't let each other escape. Not sure if that's true because I've never seen it. Sounds a lot like some crabbyistas I've met though
Good to see you got a day off with the kids!
Jim
That's a club to whack anyone that suggests that FORTH may be the best language for digging clams...
C.W.
What an excellent idea. FORTH cub culling.
Best to get them whilst they are still young and haven't had time to breed.
Well, I saw ray try to toss some out of the mud hole, and one crab was holding onto his shovel and another onto that crab.
That's right. Where we clam digging, though, was muddy, and that wouldn't have done a thing. It would have worked fine in sand, though.
There's a hole on the top side of the handles that you plug with your thumb before pulling it up. It sucks a column of wet sand out.
We have caught plenty of crabs in many different ways. But never collectd clams.