A plague of spiders
To be perfectly honest, 20 years ago, before I moved to West Dorset, I’d never even heard of spider crabs. Now they are so much a part of my recreational crab-potting and family-feeding fishing life that when talking to others about them, we only ever refer to them as ‘spiders’.
The irony is that, although the south coast of England is pretty much plagued with spider crabs at this time of year, practically nobody ever eats them, which is insane because they are delicious.
They’re like a beautiful mongrel cross between a brown crab and a lobster, having Tim Burton-monster cartoon-like spindly long legs and elongated claws, packed with lobster-like white meat. Inside their dinosaur-esque spiky armoured body shell, they have a sumptuous mixture of soft brown meat and even thicker chunky white muscle meat.
The claws
