(This is Tom Hale's opinion... what's yours?) All Bay cruisers know where to find the best crab cakes; its just that we don’t always agree. This year in Chesapeake Bay Magazine’s “Best of the Bay” awards, there were three top five crab cakes listed in Rock Hall. If you were a Rock Hall critic and thorough in your analysis and tried all three restaurants, then you would have had to find that two out of three were not the best. Indeed in Rock Hall the “best crab cake” in the Northern Bay might have satisfied only 34 percent of the diners. In any of these top 10 award programs, the result is a popularity contest. Restaurants, marinas, and anchorages can get the most votes, if they get the most visits. But sometimes a less visited restaurant marina or anchorage is actually superior, but due to its isolation, it is not well known. Better selection criteria would be to compare by the percentage of satisfied customers (realizing of course that this is a totally impractical measure). A restaurant with 1000 patrons might win Best of the Bay with 350 likes. A smaller restaurant with only 300 patrons could not win. But what if all 300 of those customers voted their restaurant to have the best crab cakes on the Bay? Would that not be a fairer, more accurate judgement? Call it a satisfaction ratio. And such is the dilemma with Drum Point Market in Tylerton. I mentioned Drum Point Market in my article on Smith Island (March PropTalk). While in Tangier recently, the weather was calm, so we took the dinghy to Tylerton for our annual quality control check. The crab cakes were better than ever, but so few people will ever know. We took 10 of them back to Tangier to share with other cruisers. (If I had to guess, I would doubt that the market sells even 10 per day ordinarily. There are fewer than 80 people in the town. I had contacted the market in advance to be sure they had enough material on hand!) I also gave one to Milton Parks of Parks Marina, an icon of the Bay. Three generations of a Tangier waterman’s family all advised us that these were the best crab cakes on the Bay (names withheld to protect the innocent). Milton Parks who at 83 has probably eaten more crabs than you and I together have even seen, waxed poetic about these crab cakes. These crab cakes are freakin’ phenomenal! I think the PropTalk staff should take a cruise to Smith Island (or trailer your inflatable to Crisfield) and confirm my assessment.