sandflea68 - It’s not what you think

I have a lifelong fascination with the ocean and now live in a small seaside town. My husband and I used to take picnics and spend most of the day at the beach standing in thigh high water, casting surf fishing rods to catch flounder and whiting. It was such a beautiful way to spend the day on our cinnamon colored sands with the cerulean blue of the white capped waves and the salt air on our cheeks.

For bait, we would catch sandfleas, which are not fleas at all but a type of crab that lives in wet sand at the water’s edge of our beach. We would wait for the waves to come in and then use a long handled net to catch the crabs going out with the flow of the water. The sandfleas are about a half inch to an inch long with no claws and they don’t bite. They breathe by gills and can live out of the water for a few hours to a few days. We would put them in a bucket with wet sand and use them to bait our hooks. Many good fish dinners came out of our partnership with sandfleas. I picked the name sandflea because it evokes such warm memories of our days in the sun.