Tina Gray, Champion Crab Picker

by Sandra Disnmore

Tina Gray ready to pick some of her highly regarded shell and cartilage free crab meat. The third generation crab picker has been at it for 25 years. Leila Sievanen photo

Tina Gray, of Little Deer Isle, has been picking crab for 33 years. She picks a species of crab variously called Jonah, Peeky-toe, or Sand crab (Cancer borealis). Its shells are found on beaches from Newfoundland to Florida.

Tina Gray is a champion crab picker. And she’s all about quality. There are never any shells or cartilage in her crabmeat. There just aren’t. Over the years she figured out how to avoid them.

Each joint, it seems, has two pieces of cartilage attached to each end. That’s four pieces of cartilage attached to each joint. If she pulls a knuckle, claw, or leg joint off a crab and doesn’t see those two pieces of cartilage on either end, she stops and goes through the pile of crabmeat she’s already picked until she finds the missing piece or pieces of cartilage. If she has people picking for her, she goes through their meat to make sure it’s shell- and cartilage-free. Having the quality of her crabmeat absolutely pure is tremendously important to her. Although she sells to people like you and me, she also sells to some of this country’s top chefs as well as to some “foodies.” She has, in fact, several super-persnickety buyers who refuse to buy from anyone else.

And Tina doesn’t ship. She sells directly from her Little Deer Isle HACCP-certified crab processing building. Customers who live far from her buy through one of Deer Isle’s seafood purveyors.

HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) is the mandatory seafood inspection program. People making any “change” in seafood, such as taking a crab apart for its meat, are required to have in place a system for identifying where hazards could occur in their handling protocols at every step through their facility, analyzing how the breakdown would occur, identifying places for controlling hazards and fixing problems, and keeping records of doing this daily. The records can be inspected.

Tina’s crab-picking room is unlike other seafood processing rooms because she has decorated hers despite it having to be all but sterilized before and after processing any seafood. All the other seafood-picking rooms I’ve seen are plain, Spartan, clinical looking. Each of Tina’s windows has a shelf above it filled with bottles of different kinds and colors brought up from the ocean bottom and covered here and there with barnacles. She also displays other decorative objects her customers, whom she refers to as her people, have brought her including a metal crab sculpture on her worktable. (She said, “I have people that think of me when they’re on vacation.”) But almost everything decorative is on the shelves above the windows in the room. I say almost because high on a wall near the door hangs a cardboard lobster one of her daughters made.

There’s a soft rhythmic sound as Tina rips apart the cooked crab legs and throws the empty shells through a hole in the table into a container beneath.

Two of these pieces of cartilage are in each of the many joints crabs use to get around with. Retrieving them all is a trick Gray has mastered. Marjorie Mills photo

She takes the cooked crab, breaks off the legs and puts them in a pile, breaks off the claws and puts them in a second pile, the bodies she stacks in a third pile.

There are two layers of meat in the bodies. She held up a crab shell and showed the area most people pick and think they’re done, but underneath is another layer of meat. (She showed how easy it is to go in too hard and snap the cartilage between the two layers. This is another way of getting cartilage in with the meat.) Surprised, I said, “You don’t break the back to get at the meat?”

“No,” Tina replied. “There’s nothing in it. Years ago that’s how they used to do it. My mother—that’s how she was taught.” Tina broke a back and then sliced it, demonstrating that there was no more meat in there than there was if she had just picked it.

In late April, the crabs have molted and have soft shells so Tina can pull them apart by hand, but when the shells are hard, if she breaks one piece of cartilage off, it goes in a separate pile because she does not want that piece of cartilage in her meat.

Although she checks meat others picked by hand and eye, some people now use ultraviolet light. Under an ultraviolet or “black light” cartilage fluoresces and shows up.

Tina’s such a pro, she’s been doing crab-picking demonstrations for years for the 25-year-old Stonington-based Island Fishermen’s Wives’ Fishermen’s Day celebration, and last year she did a demonstration on Belfast’s waterfront.

When we interviewed Tina in late April, she was still picking up crabs in the afternoon to be cooked and picked, but by summertime, when lobstering really gets going, she picks them up at the shore early in the morning. She said, “We go over in the dark.”

Asked when she gets up, Tina replied, “In the summertime about 3 o’clock.”

She heads for the shore, picks up yesterday’s crabs, brings them home, cooks them (in summer it takes about 35 minutes to cook a hundred-lb. crate,) and by 4 to 4:30 in the morning, she’s picking crab and keeps at it all day.

Asked how much she picks a day, she replied, “It depends on the season, the time of year, or orders that come in. In the wintertime I only pick a couple of days a week, sometimes three days. In the summertime we work seven days a week. When I do it by myself,” she said, “I do 15 to 20 lbs. a day.” Asked how many hours she works a day, she said, “Sometimes eight, maybe 10 depending on how many interruptions—things that go on in between.” She sells her crabmeat for $22/lb.

Tina does the picking with a homemade tool her father-in-law made for her 29 years ago. “Most people use a butter knife and cut it down,” she said. “I didn’t really like it, so he said, “Let’s try the funny eye of the trap.” (It’s the wire piece in front; there are two of them; they hook together.) He took one—it was copper— straightened it out and made a tool like the one she uses, but because it was copper, it kept bending. In time, Tina said that although this tool worked, it kept getting shorter and shorter, so she went back to her father-in-law and said, “We need the same thing, but we need something that’s going to last.” So her father in law took a piece of stainless steel rod and made the tool that is still working after 29 years of pretty constant use. She changes the electrical tape around the handle because she said it gets smelly. (Tina said her mother, who is 78 and still picking, uses a picker she has had since she was 15, so the lesson learned is once you find a tool that works the way you want it to, you don’t change.)

Tina has almost retired twice, but when asked what stopped her, said, “Not really knowing what I want to do. I don’t want to go fishing.”