Maryland crab cakes — by way of South Carolina

Melissa Haneline
The Post and Courier

Once Aaron Gage (center) and Ben Holsapple (right) unload the 13 bushels of crabs they caught in the Cooper River last week, George Rudd (left) will have them stored in a cooler and shipped by truck to Maryland.

Melissa Haneline
The Post and Courier

This big guy was caught in the Cooper River last week, and soon will be on his way north to be part of a 'Maryland' crab cake.

Those famous Maryland crab cakes might not be what you think. They, actually, may be made with South Carolina crabs.

Maryland crab distributors and picking houses turn their eyes south whenever the tasty Chesapeake Bay blue crabs get scarce, which has happened a lot in recent years due to environmental problems and heavy harvesting.

As a result, Virginia and Maryland impose increasingly strict limits on crabbers.

To get around the supply problem, one Maryland crab distributor and restaurateur recently opened a wholesale shop in Georgetown County, prompting rumors to circulate that Chesapeake Bay crabbers were invading South Carolina waters.

That supplier, John Crockett of Skip Jacks Seafood in Salisbury on Maryland's Eastern Shore, says he's not out to start any crab wars, he just wants to secure a source of crabs and save money on transportation.

He says he and other Maryland and Virginia crab suppliers have purchased crabs from South Carolina and virtually every other Southern coastal state for years to maintain a steady supply of crabs in the Chesapeake market.

So, in anticipation of yet another sorry crab season in the Chesapeake, Crockett opened the Seafood Connection in Georgetown County last month, just north of the North Santee River bridge. There he planned to purchase crabs from local crabbers and wholesalers for shipment to Maryland. "Anywhere I can get 'em," he said.

It was a great plan, except for one problem: Crabs are plentiful in the Chesapeake this year, even if they are a bit small, Crockett said.

So for now he's just buying and shipping out the biggest ones, number one jimmies.

He teamed up with George Rudd, a lifelong fisherman and crabber who lives in Dorchester County.

Rudd says he's just helping Crockett get his business going by using his lifelong connections with other crabbers. "I know the crab business," Rudd said. Currently, he's buying crabs out of his rural home near Harleyville and shipping a 200 or more bushels a week to Maryland.

He says he pays local crabbers about $60 a bushel for the big ones.

In Maryland, after costs for transportation, middlemen and other details are added in, a bushel of the biggest live blue crabs can sell for $125 and up, and for $200 to $250 if steamed with Old Bay seasoning

Rudd, 66, said he actively crabbed until last year, when he hung up his pots in favor of the wholesale business of supplying the hungry Chesapeake Bay market, where most of the East Coast crab-picking plants operate.

Up in Maryland, he said, "They don't get a nice big crab like we do here. ... Everybody in Maryland thinks they're Maryland crabs."

Paul Fanning doesn't mind the out-of-state competition, and he doubts it will succeed. He's a lifelong commercial fisherman who runs Paul's Seafood out of his home near Georgetown.

He said the business can be cutthroat, but he's not worried because he's spent years cultivating a loyal network of local crabbers to buy from. "I give the fishermen as much as I can. ... I just try to make a living," he said.

He's also been working for years with a reliable distributor to sell to in the old fishing and oystering village of Crisfield on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Sometimes they meet halfway between Maryland and South Carolina to pass off the crabs. On average, he said, he handles 50 to 100 bushels of blue crabs a day.

South Carolina holds a favored spot for Chesapeake buyers because the travel time is relatively low and the state's waters remain warm enough that crabs generally can be harvested all year. In the Chesapeake, the season ends during the fall.

"That's when they'll turn their eyes toward us," Cain said.

South Carolina lists 317 registered commercial crabbers, only four of whom are from out of state. None come from Maryland.

Those crabbers sold more than 4.1 million pounds of crabs last year, bringing in more than $3.5 million.

The money was up slightly from the year before, even though the haul was slightly less.

George Steele, of State Department of Natural Resources Fisheries Statistics Section, said the catch is off from 2004 when South Carolina crabbers hauled in nearly 4.7 million pounds of blue crabs. Just why it's down, no one knows: It could be a smaller number of crabs out there, or a drop in effort by crabbers, Steele said.

Regardless, a substantial portion of South Carolina's commercial catch goes to Maryland, where, Steele said, "they don't like to talk about it too much, I'm sure."

Reach Doug Pardue at dpardue@postandcourier.com or 937-5558