When the boilers at Bowie’s Crab Galley broke just days before the July Fourth weekend, owner Matthew Breidenbach was sure what is usually his biggest weekend for sales was going to be a wash. Instead, with aid from one of his competitors, he was able to net nearly $30,000 in sales.
Breidenbach’s boiler broke July 1, leaving him no way to steam the more than 13,000 crabs he had expected to sell that weekend, he said. Mechanics were unable to repair the boiler, and on a whim he called Shoreline Seafood owner Don Storm.
‘‘He drops what he was doing to bring a boiler over on Thursday so that we could steam our crabs and stay in business,” Breidenbach said.
Although the Gambrills-based Shoreline Seafood is one of Breidenbach’s largest competitors, Storm said he was happy to help out.
‘‘The way the crab business is going nowadays we kind of have to work together,” Storm said.
According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab population has declined 70 percent since the early 1990s, leading to historic low harvests in both Maryland and Virginia in 2007. In conjunction with Virginia leaders, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) pledged to reduce female crab harvests by 34 percent this year to help the population replenish itself.
With the price of crabs up 25-30 percent, Breidenbach said consumers are buying less, making a typically booming business weekend all the more important.
‘‘It’s been a rough year for crabs in general, and in our business we have a few weekends a year to really make some money,” he said. ‘‘If he didn’t do that, no one in Bowie would have been able to have gotten crabs from us.”
Storm lent Breidenbach one of the five mobile boilers he owns for catering events. The mobile boiler, which can cook about 30 bushels of crabs in 30 minutes, seemed to do the trick.
‘‘Even though he’s competition, he would have done it for me,” Storm said.
E-mail Andrea Noble at anoble@gazette.net.
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