FLORIDA’S FORGOTTON COAST: LIFE ON THE APALACHICOLA BAY
WORKING THE BAY
Melaine Cooper Covell
James Hicks
Monette Hicks
Monica Lemieux
Carl McCaplan
James & Betty McNeill
Charles & Rex Pennycuff
A. L. Quick
Henry Tindell

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Wes Birdsong
Corky Richards
Bobby Shiver
Charles Thompson
Genaro “Jiggs” Zingarelli

PROCESSING THE CATCH
Terry Dean
Grady Leavins
Lynn Martina
Fred Millender
Janice Richards
Anthony Taranto
Tommy Ward

THE SWEET SIDE
Donald Smiley
George Watkins

VINTAGE APALACH
Seafood & Honey

WHERE TO EAT
Apalach Eateries

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Interviews & photographs by Amy Evans

This project sponsored by the St. Joe Company.

Henry Tindell is a native of Alabama. As a teenager, he went to Eastpoint to visit an aunt. Inspired by his time there, he devised a plan for what to do when he finished high school. But Henry was eager to get on the water. In 1963 he moved to Eastpoint and finished his senior year up the road in Carrabelle. Soon after, he began harvesting oysters and crabs. He has been working on the bay ever since. In the 1980s, though, folks started cultivating soft-shell crabs. As imports began replacing the local hard crab business, soft-shell crabs became popular. It takes a special person to work with soft-shells, though. For three months out of the year, those crabs are doted on night and day. They have to be constantly monitored to catch their molt. Only a freshly molted crab can be sold as a live soft-shell. But the long nights are worth it to Henry. He figured the soft-shell business was the only area left to make a decent living off of the bay. He welcomes the opportunity to pass on his knowledge. To Henry, the glory days of crabbing are gone. And there aren’t many folks left who want to give their nights and days to the crabs.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Henry Tindell describing the process of cultivating soft-shell crabs.
[Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Subject: Henry Tindell, crabber
Date: March 24, 2006
Location: Mr. Tindell’s Crab House – Eastpoint, FL
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Friday, March 24th, 2006, and I'm in Eastpoint, Florida, with Mr. Henry Tindell, a crabber here. Would you mind saying your name, please sir, for the record?

Henry Tindell:  Henry Tindell.

And your birth date also if you don't mind?

July 17th, '45 [1945].

Are you a native of Eastpoint?

No, I was born in Alabama…Just a little south of Dothan.

Did your family move here or did you come here to work?

Yeah. Well, whenever I was in high school, I had an aunt that lived down here. I come down here whenever I was in the eleventh grade…And I enjoyed it. I mean it was real simple. Everybody done the same thing. It wasn't, you know, the work. Everybody worked the bay, and I just liked it, and I knew I had to do something when I got out of high school. And I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I said, “Well that's what I want to do.” So I came down, and I married a girl that was raised here. I started working the bay, and I worked in the oyster house one year, where they shucked oysters, and then I oystered for years, and then I started hard-crabbing, and then I hard-crabbed for years. Then they started soft-shell crabbing and people came down from Virginia that said they done a lot of it in Virginia, and I got into soft-shell crabbing. And I've been doing it for—I don't know just how many years I've been soft-shell crabbing, probably twenty-five years or so. But I've worked on the bay—I started on the bay in, I think it was [nineteen] sixty-three. And I worked on the bay ever since. Used to they would close the bay down for oystering during the summertime and you'd have to get a job for three months doing something. I worked on construction work during the summer and worked at a service station during the summer. You just picked up whatever kind of job you could for the three months but went right back to the bay as quick as it opened. For the last several years they hadn't closed it, so it's year-round and just worked the bay.

So when you first came down here and started working the oyster house and all that, did you just take to life here pretty quick or was there some adjustment to it?

I just liked it, you know. Most places off the water you have in a community—you have all different stages of work. In other words, you have what you call the day hand that's out there working at a low wage, and then you have somebody that's, you know, working a little higher wage and all. Here, everybody made the same. It was just according to how hard you wanted to work. So whether you had a doctor's degree or you didn't finish high school, that had nothing to do with it. It was [whether] you willing to get up and go to work in the morning and put in a day's work and come home. And I like that. Everybody was equal, and I really liked that. It wasn't whether you come from a family that was able to send you to college and you go on and, you know, get all of this, or whether you come from a poor family where you couldn't, you know, you had an opportunity to get the education and all and to get the finer jobs. Everybody was equal.

And the bay provides for you, if you go do it.

And the bay provided for everybody. It's changing you know. It's not like that anymore to that extent, but it was back then. And it was the only place that I had ever been that I had ever seen or ever heard of that it was like that—that everybody was on equal ground, you know. It all depended on whether you was willing to get up and go to work or not. And it just appealed to me because I felt like I could work as well as anybody else, you know, at whatever, and it just appealed to me. And I knew when I got out of school up where [in Alabama], it was kind of the farmland. And it was still hard work…I don't know, it was just something about it down here that I liked.

What was the oyster house that you got your first job?

The first job I worked at was there was a guy from Virginia down here named Elridge Massey. He run Massey's Seafood, and he had an oyster house and a crab house. And I actually worked there the summer before my senior year in school. I graduated from [high school in] Carrabelle. I came down here and graduated at Carrabelle. But I worked between my senior year and my eleventhth and twelfth grade year that summer. There were several crab houses here in those days. But [there are] no crab houses in Franklin County and not one closer than Southport and Panama City, Florida, or over in Panacea today. But back in those days there were probably four or five crab houses here on Eastpoint alone. And a lot of people crabbed. They picked crabs in the summertime because of the oysters. The bay was shut down for oysters. But everything has changed. You wouldn't believe it how it was back then.

Well, that's what I'm hearing.

You know, it was totally different back then and, well all the younger people have—well, they’re smart in a way. By the way it's changing they're beginning to get out of the bay. They're going onto school. They're going and getting jobs because it's changing, and it's not going to last…I mean, there aren't many places that you can make a living and do it on your own on your terms and somebody not telling you you've got to be here at a certain time and no, you can't have tomorrow off, if you need it, you know. You've got to take—you can take any day you wanted or you could work seven days a week, you know.

But with that independence also comes things like no health insurance and stuff like that.

Oh, yes. Yeah all of that was on you. Everything depended on you, which I still like that. I still like it better because—I don't know. It's just an independence. I've always been willing to get up and go to work just like the job I'm doing today in soft-shell crabbing. This job is seven days a week, and it's every three hours, day in and out.

So tell me about this building here [where you cultivate your soft shell crabs] because this is pretty new, isn't it?

It got tore down last year [by Hurricane Dennis]. I was in that old building over there [next door to the east]. And the hurricane tore it down and I built this this year. This is the first year I've been in here.

And soft-shell season is about to really start up this month, is that right?

Yeah, it usually runs March, April, and May—the main part of it. I mean, you can shed them all year, but those are the three months it's the heaviest. I mean, if you're going to do anything—you're going to make any money—you're going to do it in those three months. And then the rest of the year, you know, you just pretty much get by but. If you're going to really make any money, you've got to make it in those three months.

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Well tell me about your setup here and how all this works for [cultivating] the soft-shells.

Well soft-shell crabbing is—it's just a blue crab you catch that's fixing to molt and become soft. You have to run traps out there [in the bay]. Some people calls them pots. You bait them with male crabs, and the females will go to the male crabs for protection when they're shedding. So before they start shedding or getting close to shedding, they'll go in the trap with the male crab. The male crab will pick her up and tote her, and that's the way we catch the peelers—the female peelers to come in. Now the male crab peelers, they're different. They’re hunting for someplace to hide, and they'll go into any kind of an old dark trap or grassy trap or something like that better, you know. They’re just wanting to hide because, when they shed, within four hours they're hard again. So when you—whenever I bring them in here, I have to come down—well, I usually come down every evening. It's according to how many I've got in here to go through to how early I get down, and then I separate them according to [the] stage [that] I think they're going to be in close to shedding.
This front vat here is what I call my shedding vat. That's one they shed out of at night. And the crabs I put in there usually will shed during that next night. If not, early the next morning they'll shed. So whenever I come down every evening, I go through and make sure I get all that should go in there, and then it's just back and forth all night and all day. You have to check them. If you pack them and are selling them live—not freezing them—It's about every three hours. If you're freezing them—or you could pick them completely—everything is shed when you come down, [and] you could do it every four hours. But the ones that's really just shedding won't live any length of time, so you have to leave him in the water for—it needs to be shedded at least an hour before you take him out to pack him to ship him for him to stay alive. So that cuts your time down and you have to come every three hours.

What are you looking for when you know they're going to be shedding?

When on the back of a—the back fin of a crab—a female crab—they'll have a red right around the edge of that back fin. See it in the sun?

Uh-hmm, yes, sir. A red kind of line.

They'll start having a red line and this v-flap—we call it a v-flap; females got a v-shape when it's going to shed, if it's ever going to shed again. A grown one will have a round [flap]. Now this one will have a round one when it sheds, but it gets that pink color in it. One that's not close to shedding, it's a different color, and it will have a v-flap. Any female that is going to shed is going to have a v-flap. If they've got that round flap that [means] they're grown, and they're not going to shed anymore. Now see, that one is getting well a little color in it, not near—near as bright red, the line in his back flipper back there you will see it's just a light pink—not very much.

Seems to be a subtle difference to me. [Laughs]

But if you sit—notice how that male crab is toting that female?

Yes, sir.

That's what happens. They pick them up to carry them. You know you ain't going to fool him; he knows she's going to shed, so he'll tote her. If he's toting her, you know she's going to shed. So you could go ahead and bring her in.

So do you have a certain ratio of male to female in [a vat]?

No, usually what happens, those male crabs was going to shed I thought when I brought them in. They'd have a little bit of line on them but when you bring them in this house you don't feed them. And if—if a male crab for some reason—I don't know why—if they're not pretty close to shedding, they'll go back to what we call go back the other way. They won't continue on through the molt; they'll stop and go back until you throw him back out in the water and let him run in the wild. He won't molt again but once he starts feeding and everything, he'll go through the cycle again, see, because molting is the only way the grow. That's actually the way they grow. So if you catch him what we call too green—not close enough to shedding—he's going to have to keep continuing eating to go on through his molt. You can catch him and bring him in here where he don't get anymore food, and then he won't go on through the molt. He'll stop and go back the other—what we call the other way. I mean, he'll just stop. But if you put him back out in the wild—I put them in my traps because you put bait in your traps where the male crabs can feed because you've got them shut up, and then they'll reverse and start back the other way and then go through a molt.

That's amazing.

You can bring him back in later and put him back in the vat. It's the same crab, but you stopped its food. Of course, a female crab, if you catch them too green, they will do the same thing. But usually, if the male crab is picking her up to carry her, she is far enough along in the cycle of molting that she won't revert back. She'll continue on through it whether you feed or her not. She'll continue on.

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So you have eight vats here, so are really in eight stages of molting?

No, not really. What I do I bring them in, and when you're on the boat, it's hard to look at them real close because you're running, but I dump them in a cull box, where I can pick them up. If I see one that looks like he's real—shows real pink color and all I put him separate from the others. I bring him in and I put him over here in one of these vats that's close to shedding. The others I know it's going to be two to three days before they'll molt, so I'll put him in a vat and just let them sit there for a couple days—three days before I go through them. And I'll do that; I'll have sometimes three or four vats that I hadn't touched you know within two or three days but then after they sit there for a couple—three days I'll go through them. Well some of them will be moved on close to shedding because of—they in different stages you know in that vat. I'll take them out and bring them on over; a lot of times I leave the others in the vat and I just put them back in the vat. And it's just to go through—you know like that and—and it—that's where you get a lot of your time. See like this crab right here, now see that's a different vat and she's fixing to shed, and she should have been up yonder. If you leave her in there they're going to eat her because they will eat if they got something to eat. They'll even eat in this vat. So they'll eat—they'll eat one fixing to shed.

But if they're all shedding then they're all safe?

If they’re all cracked or real close to shedding they won't [be safe]. They'll stop completely eating…Now like in that vat over there, they're close enough that they won't really eat, but for some reason, they'll still catch a hold with the pinchers, and they'll hold on when one is trying to shed out or something. Well if that crab is trying to come out of that hull, I guess it's taking all the effort it's got trying to come out. If something hangs it up where it come off free it will come, it'll stop just where it won't even move. [Usually] they start working their-selves out of that shell—backing out. Well if something and hangs to where she can't pull out, she'll die because she'll get out so far, but she can't get on out. Now you could catch a hold of that fin and pull it tight, and she'll turn it loose and drop that fin and grow another. But they won't do it while they're shedding for some reason.

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So how long are you going to leave [the molted crabs] in here?

These I'll take back to the house. I got a cooler up there at the house, and all I do it pack them out over night and put them in trays with grass in the bottom, and you put grass over the top of them and ship them live. And I sell to Water Street Seafood over in Apalachicola. They come to the house every morning and pick them up. And I take them to the house. And you have to weigh each one of them to grade them. And I weigh them out, pack them in them boxes, and put them in the cooler, and they send a truck there every morning to pick them up.

Well, so I'm wondering, when you picked that one that was really cracked open [and] shedding out of this vat over here, there are a lot of crabs in there. Your eye just went straight to it.

Well you get—[Laughs] it's all in like doing anything. If you do it long enough there's just something about the—the color and all—it will just catch your eye. It's hard to explain to anybody. It's just all in doing it for a long time. There's nothing—like I told some of the boys I said about crabbing. They said, “Oh, it takes so much to know how to crab.” I said, “it don't take nothing to know how to crab. It's just wanting to. You're going to learn yourself.” Nobody can learn you because the first time I ever went crabbing in my life I had never been on a crab boat but one time and that was in Panacea [Florida] and rode out in the Gulf.
But years ago, when I was young and we all loved to do—boys loved to get out after work and get together, and we had softball teams, and we had this kind of team and that kind of team. Well, I played on a softball team around here, but I was one that would never knock off from work to go play ball. The boys wanted me to come in and play softball with them, and I would not knock off and come in, so one of them—one of them was a crabber. So hard crabbing you can usually—you get out before daylight but you're usually home by lunchtime—at least one o'clock. So he says, “We're going to have to learn you how to crab where you'll be home.” So I went crabbing with him one day, and he showed me how he pulled traps. And he come back to my house and cut a crab trap out for me. He had a roll of wire at his house he brought down there and he cut a crab trap out for me, and then he showed me how to build a crab trap and said, “Now, order you some wire and build you some traps.” Well in those days, summer—here in the summer, oystering was closed, and you had to do something anyway. And I was always having to find a job in the summertime, so I built me up, I think it was 127 traps. [I] didn't know nothing about it, never been in this bay crabbing. I had been oystering on the oyster bars and knew nothing about crabbing. But I loaded them up, and I went out there, and I put them out. If they didn't catch something, I'd get a pole, and I'd pound the bottom and try to figure out how come. Why these was catching them and over there wasn't? And that's all the art to it. I mean, I started and had never been on a boat, and I've been doing it for years and years. So there's nothing anybody can't learn. I mean it's not complicated. It's just wanting to.

But is this soft-shell crab business, in particular, something that you're passionate about? What is that exactly?

Well once you get the age I am—I'm sixty years old, and I got a little bit of sense of reality. I've got a high school education, but I've done this all of my life. So I'm not a real educated person, other than just high school. If I was to quit what I'm doing today, and I went out and started looking for a job, how many people wants to hire somebody that's fixing to be sixty-one years old on a job to make a living? Hard crabbing imports has killed seafood. The only reason you can survive with this right here—[imports are] going to kill one part of it, but one part it will not because we ship these live. They can't ship them from South America live and keep them alive long enough. They can ship them frozen, and they're going to kill the frozen market. They've killed the hard crabbing. That's the reason you don't see any crab houses up and down the coast. They've destroyed the shrimpers, and that is the only part. And I got sense enough to know that that's the only thing I can do to survive on food. That's the reason any young person that walks in here that asks about my opinion, I say, “Get out of the bay, son, because you ain't going to make it.” I did. I come along in a time when I could. But those times is gone.

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Are there many other people soft-shell crabbing around here?

Well, here in Eastpoint right now, I don't think there are but—well, he hadn't even started up. My brother-in-law. But he's going to soft-shell. Chris Chason. I think there are three or four of us that soft-shells here in Eastpoint, which there ain't three or four of us that even crab. In Apalach [Apalachicola] there are a few more. I don't think over in Carrabelle—not in Carrabelle anybody…Crabbing is on its way out. I mean, there's no place to sell them, if you caught them. The price—I caught crabs this winter for a nickel a pound more than I got paid in 1985 for crabs in the wintertime, so that's what happened. The meat price is nothing. The crab houses can't pick the meat and they can't pay you because they get the imported meat in on the market. And I mean, you can't blame somebody, if they can't afford to pay it. But you figure out, I was buying bait—Florida helped us out with the net ban, you know. They banned the nets for the workers out here, so the bait we used to bait crab traps and all it doubled within—from the time it went in effect, it doubled in thirty days. And it just kept climbing. So today I'm paying twenty-eight cents a pound for bait to put in the crab trap. In [nineteen] eighty-five I was paying six-cents a pound. In [nineteen] eighty-five I was getting forty-cents a pound for hard crabs. Today, I was getting forty-five [cents]. In [nineteen] eighty-five, what was the gas price? Maybe less than fifty cents? Today it's two [dollars] and fifty [cents], so I mean that tells you something.

What's the price on soft shell crabs these days?

Soft shell crabs—now live, they [have] a good price on them: twenty-eight dollars a dozen for the large and twenty-four dollars for the next size, sixteen, and it goes down. Frozen, they're less. And I look for that to be even less because they can ship in. Right now, frozen is selling—the large for twenty-two dollars, the next size twenty [dollars] and on down. That's the reason I'm still in here because it's survival. I mean I don't think anybody enjoys getting up [at] one o'clock at night, four o'clock in the morning. Well I'll start—I'll cull these crabs, and I'll leave here, and I'll come back down here at eight o'clock at night. I'll come back at ten, and then I'll go home and lay down. I'll be back down here at one o'clock. I'll be back down here at four o'clock, and I'll cull everything and get everything ready, and then I'll go crabbing. I'll come in at dinnertime, and I'm back down here at two, back down here at four, back down here at eight, back down here at ten, back down here at one, back down here at four. And that's seven days a week and no break. I don't think anybody feels like it's somebody enjoys that. But it's survival. I'm fit to be 61 years old. You know, what choice do I have?

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I feel like somebody just told me that they're about to start instituting a big multi-thousand dollar fine for errant traps out in the bay that will get caught in boats and—?

Well, I don't know what's going to happen with that. They come down, a group, and we all discussed it and it's pending legislation with Florida that they change and put some new rules on. We got to buy tags now, and used to, we didn't have to pay for a license. If you was in it, you filed, and they sent you a license, you know. But now it's going to cost 150 dollars a year for a hard crab pot license. For a soft-shell crab license it's going to cost you 250 dollars. Plus, for every trap you got, you got to buy a tag from the state; it's going to cost you fifty-cents a piece to go on your traps. So you're talking about another—I usually don't never run over 200 traps, so you're talking about another 100 dollars for hard shell [license] and 200 dollars for soft-shell. That's 450 dollars and another 150 dollars is 500, 600 dollars extra [that] it's going to cost each year just for me to operate. I mean that's just extra.

So what are they looking to get by knowing exactly who owns what trap?

Don't ask me why the state does what they do because I've—as I have told a lot of them, and I've told some of the state workers, I guess they have good intentions. I don't feel like they just—the State had decided hey we're going to come down and put you out of business. I guess they have good intentions, but I've never seen them mess with nothing they didn't mess up. I mean that's just a fact. They'll come down and everything will be going fine, and they're going to help you out; they're going to get these laws, you know, and they're going to make studies, and they're going to get all this better. Well when you see that happens—and everything I've ever seen them involved in, look out. It's fixing to be gone. And I just don't have—I won't say that—that they just want everybody out of the bay because I don’t really feel like that they're setting up there in Tallahassee plotting, “Hey, we're going to put that bunch out of work.” I don't feel that way about it. But I feel like a lot of people coming out of college has got to have a job doing something, and they've read a lot in books, and books don't tell you too much about a lot of things. And when the put law in on this bay or start fooling with the bay, they ask them, “Well, make a study and tell us what to do.” Well they can study up there in Tallahassee and come down here and piddle around out there for a few minutes the rest of their lives, and they ain't going to know nothing.
As I told them a long time before, there was an older guy that lived beside of me, he's dead now, but he worked this bay for all of his life. There are a lot of older guys that's worked this bay. I said, “If you want to know about the bay, go talk to him.” Well they said, “If he's shrimping, he's going to just you know, he's going say things to help him shrimp.” I said, “Look, that's our livelihood out there. The last person that wants to destroy it is us that depends on it.” I said, “If there ain't a fish out there or anything, you can go boat riding. You can go sightseeing. The last thing we want to do is destroy it.” And they would find out a whole lot more, you know, but that's all that—that ain't never going to change.
I mean, and like I say, it ain't going to last that many more years. It's beginning to build up around here and [this lifestyle], it's on its way out. It ain't going to last. I'm sixty, fixing to be sixty-one, and I said [to myself], if I get five more years in and my health will hold up that I can last five more, you know, that's the end of the line. I mean, I hate it, but I got—well, I've got two girls. They're grown. They ain't never worked on the bay, you know, but I've got grandkids. I don't want them out there, but I wish they had the opportunity, if that's what they wanted to do, you know. But they're not going to have it. So, you know, that's the way things go. You ain't going to change it. You just going to live with it.

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Well, what you like for people to know the most about what it is that you do here?

Well I—[Laughs]—I really don't know. I just know it's a thing on the way out. You know, if they want to see how it's done, they better come on and see because it ain't going to be here forever. [Laughs] It’s something that's like a lot of other things, it's going to be a thing of the past before long. It is. I realize that. I wish it was something I could do to change it, but there's nothing I can do to change it. Not that I want to do it that more many years. My time is about run out, but I would like for, you know, anybody that wanted to have the opportunity, you know. This, whether it be my kids or if you was to move down here and have kids and they wanted to do it, you know, or anybody.

Pass it on.

Yeah, if that's what they want to do. I feel like anybody, you know, [should] be able to do what they want to do, if they can make a living at it, you know. And it's not going to hurt anybody else, you know. I mean, that's the way I've always been about anything. I don't want to try to keep somebody else from doing something because I'm doing it or, you know, try to. Except I ain't never done a whole lot that anybody else would want to do, I don't guess. [Laughs] I enjoyed it as well as anything I could have done. I mean, it's all work. I don't think you're going to go through life and make a living without working, so you're going to have to do something. If you can find something that you can make a living at and feel reasonable about going to work every morning, I think that's the thing you need to do. And I've always knowed I had to do something, so this happened to be it. You never know growing up what you're going to do. I know if somebody had asked me when I was fifteen or sixteen years old—said, “Son, you're going to make a living on the water.” I [would have] said, “You need to go see somebody to examine you, fellow. There's something wrong with you.”

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What do you really like about what you do?

Well, one thing is if I want to come down here—like this evening, it was all up to me and what I had to do. If I needed to run to Apalach for an hour, I can run back there. If I get up in the morning, usually I leave the house by six, six-thirty to go crabbing, but if it's necessary and I need to—I need to stay in 'til nine o'clock to go take care of something—I don't have to ask nobody's permission. I can go take care of it, and I come on back and do my work…I know I’ve got to go to work; I know I don’t get paid a dime unless I make it. It all depends on what I do. But yet I don’t have to—I don’t have to go get permission from somebody whenever I think something is necessary to do and all and that. That’s really the freedom, right there. You call it freedom. You really don’t have freedom. There ain’t nobody working a forty-hour job that even comes close to putting in the hours that I do. I mean, I could put in forty hours and think I was on vacation, you know. I’ve never worked forty hours in my life even when—in the summertime whenever I used to pick up jobs in the summertime. The closest I ever come to forty hours, I worked on St. Joe’s Schoolhouse when they were building it over there, and we put in ten hours a day. That meant I worked fifty hours a week. That’s the least amount of hours I’ve ever put in in my life—in a week. So I mean, I’m used to working in the oyster house and went to work at six o’clock, and you never got off before eight. You could put in fourteen hours to start with, and then you’re liable to have to come back about—after you go home and get supper, come back and load trucks. So you know, [working] a bunch of hours has never been nothing because that’s what I’ve always done.

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