Always enjoyed the boatless crabbing techniques...rings/pots off docks and trestles, castable crab catchers and wading the eel grass flats. We used to stay for a month in Westport each summer. Then, we could catch a limit on almost any low tide by wading the flats of Half Moon Bay. That technique combined the "thrill of the hunt" with the fun of catching crab. Your last statement sums it up perfectly.

I used a garden cultivator tool for catching the crab. It had a five foot handle and four five inch tines. The tines were dull and wouldn't puncture a crab's shell. This poor man's crab rake worked well to pull buried crab out of the sand; when you found a crab scurrying to get away, you could corner it and it would clamp onto the tines...game over! Once when wading, I was seeing nothing, nada. I must have banged the rake on the bottom, because the sand around my feet exploded with dozens of legal sized crab, all heading for the deepwater of the bay. It was like flushing a covey of quail, but only having a single shot shotgun.

Going to have to try your "hillbilly crabbing" technique. Anybody have suggestions for keeping crab alive for longer periods, when you can't cook them promptly and you have aways to go before you can process them.