It’s a Saturday in early November, the opening day of Dungeness crab season in California. My friend Micah is pulling his boat up to the wooden dock at Horseshoe Cove, directly underneath the north end of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, in Sausalito. An avid fisherman from nearby San Rafael, Micah has brought hoop nets, his two sons, and enough foul-weather gear to ward off the encroaching fog and rain. My family and I pile in, and off we go, jetting across the bay and beneath the bridge, into a cove that we’re all hoping is teeming with crab.
After an hour or so, the ocean delivers. We pull in nets full of crabs, throwing back what we can’t keep due to size and daily limits, and dropping the rest into a tank on the boat. En route back to the dock, Micah asks if we want to come over for a crab lunch at his place. Obviously, the answer is yes. A quick stop at the Saturday farmers’ market at Marin Country Mart in Larkspur yields a bag of fresh-from-the-soil potatoes and a crusty French baguette from Rustic Bakery to accompany the steamed crabs.
I’ve eaten a lot of delicious food over the years in bountiful Marin County, a verdant peninsula surrounded by the Pacific just north of San Francisco. But honestly, those crabs we caught ourselves might top the list—the freshest of seafood, dunked in bowls of melted butter.