The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

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