For the 42 competitors who gathered on the Marathon waterfront Saturday, there was only one objective: 25 stone crab claws, cracked, cleaned and consumed faster than anyone else in the Florida Keys.
It was the 15th annual Stone Crab Eating Contest at Keys Fisheries, held this year on Halloween, and the field came prepared. They arrived with mallets, cutting boards and heavy-duty claw crackers. Many came in full crab regalia. One competitor even brought a frying pan, to crack the claws in bulk. They competed in heats of 12, followed by six two-person teams, knowing that any meat left behind would mean a penalty.
In the end, the title went to a man with a spoon.
“The secret to winning is cracking as quick as possible,” said first-place winner Timothy Sadowsky (pronounced SUH-DOW-SKEE) of Cooper City, Florida. “I’m using a spoon.”
Sadowsky, who has entered the contest for four years, finished in 16 minutes and 39 seconds, making it the second straight year a spoon has taken the title. His training was exacting. “I practice by not eating the night before, and I also bought 10 pounds of stone crab a couple days before the contest to practice on,” he said. His technique, he explained, comes down to restraint. “Just use enough pressure to crack the shell, but not squish the meat.”
Sadowsky took home a first-place prize package valued at $2,200, then returned to the table and placed third in the team competition. He planned to eat stone crab again that night. Asked about the traditional mustard sauce, the champion did not waver. “I’m not a mustard guy,” he said.
In the team competition, Ricky Allen and Capt. William Giliberti Jr. of Marathon defended their home waters, taking first place with a time of 7 minutes and 40 seconds.
Molly, a dog in a full lobster costume, did not compete, but was widely accepted as the event’s unofficial mascot.
The contest celebrates the start of stone crab season, which runs Oct. 15 to May 1. Florida harvests about 2 million pounds of stone crab a year, 40 percent of it from the Florida Keys, and Keys Fisheries is the state’s largest processor of the claws. The contest raised more than $3,000 for the Grace Jones Community Center in Marathon, which has provided affordable child care, meals and after-school programs for Florida Keys working families for nearly 70 years.
Stone crab is also a sustainable fishery. Harvesters take the claws and return the crabs to the water, where the claws grow back and the crabs can be harvested again. Which means that somewhere off the Florida Keys, the crabs behind Saturday’s claws are working on new ones for next year’s competition.
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