Monday, February 26, 2007

Kate got Crabs

I went on a lovely trip to Pt Vincent this weekend which involved a lot of visiting the beach, drinking, resting and eating (all of which are key to a successful weekend away)

One of the highlights was going crabbing (my virgin experience) and it’s definitely more fun than it sounds. For everyone not familiar with crabbing you get yourself a rake thingy (metal is the best idea) and start raking the sand in the shallow water until you hit something hard.

Then an angry crab comes out and tries to bite your feet (if you’re smart you’d be wearing gumboots or similar but all I had was a pair of thongs) then with a bit of skill you scoop the crab up with the rake or get it to let go of your toe and grab on to the rake (whichever comes first) and throw it into a bucket.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds and the one and only crab I caught had snuck up behind me and grabbed my leg. Between the six of us we caught 25 crabs and had one mighty feast.

The only problem with Pt Vincent is that it’s a one pub town. This means they can charge what they want, serve what they want and be as rude as they like.

We visited the Ventnor Hotel for dinner which is the only place to go on a Saturday night and it was a nice enough place except we stuck out like sore thumb not looking particularly local. The real trouble started when we mentioned we had a vegetarian amongst our group and since they didn’t have a single vego menu item could this person just have the salad bar?

We were promptly told ‘You can’t just have salad bar’ and it’s a minimum $12 just to sit at a table (in a half filled restaurant). In the end we came to a $10 salad bar agreement with the rest of us paying an $18 ea for a fairly sub standard chicken parmy.

An hour later all the other patrons had their meals, including at least 4 tables that arrived after us but we were still without food. Just as we queried where our meals were out they came with cardboard flavoured chips and Dee’s medium rare steak very well cooked.

There are two morals to this story:
1. Don’t be a vegetarian in a country town
2. Wear shoes while crabbing

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Awesome post, Kate!

Julian said...

The title sounds like a post George would make...

...but otherwise, sounds like a nice place (pub and yokels aside). You can also do the crabbing thing with a net off a jetty, but then you can also pick up a stray pufferfish when pulling the net back up (true story - happened to me once).