With soft shelled crab season here i've been craving them lately. I figure it would be fun to try to catch them myself. What is the best way to go about trying? Do they perfet the deeper water or the shallows? Is it possible?
We get them later in the Summer while crabbing or floundering. They are not plentiful, but one night we manged 13 several years ago on Folly Beach. Normally we would get a few but almost never over 5 or 6. It is fun to catch them. Otherwise, Sells Fish in Summerville has frozen soft shells now and plans to stock live soft shells in the future.
Stupid crabbing trick: Use a large silver spoon and attach a fish head to it and drop it down about a foot from the bottom. For som reason unbeknownst to me, it attracts the big jimmys, which will sometimes be holding on to a soft shell. It sounds strange, but we got 3 soft shelled crabs last Summer near Bushy Park crabbing this way and a dozen and a half dozen hard crabs. It was an accidental discovery. My wife wanted something to crab with since she'd already caught 3 nice blue crabs while fishing one day several years ago, so she grabbed a rod I had rigged with a good sized silver casting spoon with a white bucktail. She put a chunk of cut bait on it and 5 minutes later I pulled up a large jimmy and a soft shell. We've repeated it many times since then. Strange but true.
PioneerLouie Pioneer Venture 175, Johnson 90 Summerville, SC
Soft Shelled Crabs
Posted - 03/21/2012 : 2:01:13 PM
