It’s rained pretty much every day for the last three weeks. Sometimes it rains for twenty minutes, sometimes for three hours, but we’re getting rained on every day.

A side effect of this phenomenon is the emergence of the Evil Mutant Bahamian Land Crab, or as I refer to them, the EMBL-Crab, or just EMBL for short.

The EMBLs arrive only after a series of rainy days. Normally, in dry times, they stalk the back edges of the Bahamian bush, but when the rains come, the EMBLs loose whatever brain power they possess and take to the streets to seemingly playing their own version of Frogger.

It’s big sport here for the locals to go in the bush and capture the EMBLs and they are viewed as something of a local delicacy in most of the out island communities.

Now being from the Chesapeake Bay area, we’re intimately familiar with the Blue crab, which lives in the water, but I’ve never hunted or eaten the EMBLs until yesterday, when I headed into shore. It was kind of easy to do, as all I had to do was cross the Queen’s highway, enter the bush and search for nearby EMBLs by looking down at the ground. 

I found several almost immediately and I picked out two of the larger morsels for closer inspection. I apprehended the duo with the cunning use of my Betty Crocker Easy Cook oven mitt and then returned home.

Once back on the mother ship, I broke out the pressure cooker, a beer, some vinegar and my super secret crab spice mix that we use back home when we steam our crabs.

I figured if it works on blue crabs, I’d try the same thing with the EMBLs and the results didn’t disappoint. The EMBLs taste almost identical to our hometown crabs, which in turn taste almost identical to the spider crabs I hunt under the rocks over at Long Island. Hmm, at least they don’t taste like chicken.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to the last few days. More to follow, end of line …