For Chesapeake Crabbers, Hard Job Only Gets Harder

There may be a crisis brewing in the Chesapeake Bay, but this town’s watermen are “damned if we can find it,” one of them, Stewart Emily, said recently.

They may be damned anyway.

They come in from the bay every afternoon, bringing what they say is fresh evidence that Maryland’s blue crab population is thriving. Their caps and sleeves are streaked with crab muck. Their hands are nicked. They have russet August sunburns three months early. Their boats are laden with wire-mesh traps teeming with crabs hauled up from the deep--destined for packing plants that line the docks for miles along the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore.

At 59, Emily has dredged up crabs for more than 25 years now. It is a grimy, arduous business plagued by high tides, boat breakdowns, lousy weather and rivals as cutthroat as sea pirates. He would not trade it for an office gig.

“Now you tell me,” Emily said as he worked inside a dockside shanty where crustaceans by the hundreds scuttled along a row of sink-like tanks. “Does this look like a crisis?”

It does to a worried legion of environmentalists and wildlife officials--and to Maryland’s governor, Parris Glendening. The bay’s bounty is deceptive, officials insist, hiding a plummeting blue crab population in danger of extinction. Last year, the region’s watermen caught 21 million pounds of blue crabs--the worst harvest since officials began keeping records in 1993.

When Maryland acted last month to protect the crab population by proposing new rules slashing the hours that watermen could fish, crabbers from the lower Eastern Shore rebelled.

Crisfield, a bay-side speck of a town of 2,800, became the epicenter of the revolt. Angry watermen took their complaints to the state Capitol in Annapolis, where they jammed into a hearing room and pressured a legislative committee into bucking the proposals.

The move so enraged Glendening that he used his regulatory authority to enact the rules anyway. He cut crabbers’ allowable work time from 14 hours a day to eight. Then Maryland officials said they also would move to end the crabbing season a month early, on Nov. 1.

Eric C. Schwaab--the state Department of Natural Resources’ fisheries director who oversees Maryland’s $150-million annual crab industry--justifies the shortened season as the best way to reduce the bay’s catch. Officials are determined to cut the crab haul by 6% this year, the first of three years of similar planned reductions. Some scientists, worried that the crab stock is the thinnest since the late 1960s, contend even that pace is too slow.

“We think these are the fairest options available,” Schwaab said.

That rationale brings sarcastic snorts at Gordon’s, the dimly lit carry-out diner where mud-caked watermen grab their meals on the way to their boats. “Killing us with kindness,” groused one waterman at a rear table.

Glendening’s plan to cut the crab harvest short would come at the worst possible time for Crisfield--just as the largest population of crabs migrates south past the lower shore and into Virginia waters. November is high season for Crisfield, and many watermen here grumble that Glendening’s move was deftly conceived revenge.

“Our assumption was there was some spite involved,” said Terrence N. Conway, who runs a major Crisfield packinghouse and is one of the leaders of the crab rebellion. “The governor didn’t like the fact that the Legislature sided with us. So this is our payback.”

There is a simple explanation for the timing, responded Michael Morrill, the governor’s spokesman. The watermen’s opposition to any regulations delayed the start of the reduced crabbing hours until late July--two months after crab season started. Forced to find another way to cut the harvest, Morrill said, Glendening had no option but to shorten the season.

Morrill and other state officials say that many watermen--particularly those north of Crisfield--are more accepting of the new rules. Watermen’s groups were part of a state commission that helped develop the proposals. The rebels on the lower shore number only several hundred, Morrill said, a small enclave among the state’s more than 5,000 licensed crabbers.

Conway, who heads the anti-regulation Blue Crab Conservation Coalition and runs the John T. Handy Seafood Co., insists that Crisfield’s angry crabbers are the vanguard of a growing movement. They remain skeptical of the state’s dire warnings, Conway said, because annual crab harvests have always spiked upward and downward--like a seismograph in an earthquake.

“You can’t crab to extinction,” argued Casey Todd, 46, who heads a Crisfield crab and oyster processing firm. “In good years, you don’t know what to do with all the crabs out there. Bad years, you just give up early because it’s not worth it. It just comes and goes.”

The town’s crab entrepreneurs insist that state scientific surveys showing that crab populations are declining have never adequately identified the cause. If crabs are imperiled, Conway said, there are other villains who need to be regulated--unlicensed recreational crabbers who troll the bay in the summer months and aquatic predators like rockfish and grouper with a distinct appetite for young crabs.

Yet even in Crisfield, there are watermen who see merit in regulations. As gulls swooped overhead, Jody Tull, 26, paused while dropping off a load of live crabs to shrug off the effect of the shortened hours. “Eight hours a day is plenty for most of us,” he said. “I can live with that. If we don’t have some kind of limits, we’ll kill it for sure.”

Friends asked him in April to join the rebels’ trip to Annapolis. He turned them down.

Tull sees the problem in the swelling numbers of crab pots dropped each year in the Chesapeake. Although the state has frozen the number of licenses granted to crabbers, officials say the bay is filling with a steady rise in traps. The crab pot glut is visible in any of Crisfield’s sleepy neighborhoods, where cages of rusty wire cluster like bad abstract sculpture in watermen’s yards.

Schwaab estimates there are more than 200,000 traps in the bay--a third more than a decade ago. But under their licenses, crabbers could put out as many as a million traps. As pressure builds to outdo rivals, “it’s getting like an arms race,” Schwaab said. “If your neighbor puts out 100 traps, you’re going to put out 150 to get an edge.”

Even at his age, Stewart Emily says he doesn’t have to litter the bay floor with pots to make a decent living or stretch his day out to 14 hours to compete. “Only a crazy man works 14 hours,” Emily said. “We can get it done in eight.”

But the state’s move to pare the workday is still troubling, Emily said with a sigh, because the extra hours always have provided a cushion to make up for time lost to boat engine malfunctions and mischief wreaked by high tides. And when Maryland’s crabbing season ends Nov. 1, “Virginia will just wait and take all our crabs” as the swarms move south beyond the state’s waters.

Still, Crisfield’s watermen have weathered dismal harvests and meddling politicians “since my granddaddy’s crabbing days. We’ll live with this too, I suppose,” Emily allowed as he stirred his crab tanks.

“It just makes a job that’s already tough more of a hassle.”