Winter 2010

Oregon Living
Home Grown
Crabbing
the Oregon Coast
A generations-old tradition, crabbing is Oregon’s
maritime bounty, Corey Rock’s “cowboy” lifestyle
and the tastiest catch for these four recipes
Crab
Recipes
by Cathy Carroll
photos by Joni Kabana
>>
The ringtone on Corey Rock’s cell
phone is “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses,
but for this third-generation fisherman in
Newport, patience is of little use when it’s
crab season.
“My father’s a great fisherman, and
he always says that in crabbing, there’s
the quick and the dead,” says Rock, 38.
“There’s only so much crab out there, and
they’ll all be caught up. It’s just a matter of
who’s going to do it.”
An Oregon crabber will bring in an
average of 150,000 pounds of Dungeness
crab, which wholesales for an average of
$2 per pound. The commercial crabbing
season begins in December and lasts for
three months. The short season breeds
long risks.
In a typical December along the Oregon
coast, waves reach about 12 feet, but at
least once a year, swells of 20 feet or higher
will threaten crab fishermen, says Rock.
“There is a lot of wind. You’re pulling
in your gear, securing things on deck,
shutting the doors down tight, and you jog
into it. You point the bow into the weather
at a crawl, enough so you can steer.”
But that doesn’t diminish his love for
a job that is in his blood. For Rock, the
tradition began when his grandfather,
Archie Rock, took up fishing on the
central Oregon coast after the logging
dried up in the Medford area. His father,
Joe Rock, followed in his wake, and now
three generations of the family have made
their living from pulling Dungeness crab
from the Oregon coastal waters.
“It’s one of the last things where you can
wake up in the morning and you have no
idea what’s going to happen,” he says. “It’s
the last cowboy-ish thing to do.”
When the tide is high, Rock steers
the Kylie Lynn, a 73-foot shrimp trawler
from the Louisiana Gulf Coast that
Rock modified for West Coast crabbing,
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