The 7-year-old has bent himself so that his chest rests atop a short piling and his feet and legs extend back across the dock proper. His head and shoulders are suspended over the murky water, and his hands deftly work a thin, cotton line upward between his fingers.
"Got one?" says a playmate, anxiously spinning a long-handled net. "Got one? Is he still on?"
The 7-year-old nods and says quietly, "He's really tugging. I think it's a keeper."
The playmate dips the net into the water and scoops.
A shout goes up from the two as one, "Got him!"
A lump of chicken tied and lightly weighted at the bottom end of the line is tossed back into the water, and the catch is shaken from the net into a bucket.
It did not matter that the tide was low and the sun high. Still, there were crabs to be caught, enough about to put a dozen on the table at dinner time.
It is a game played by kids of all ages every summer on the Chesapeake and its tributaries, the business of dip-netting blue crabs.
Often, the older the player, the more serious the game, and chicken necking gives way to manning a string of traps, fishing a few pots or running 500 feet of trotline -- and sub-teens give way to men in skiffs who proficiently run the channel edges.
This summer, the crabs are early, following a mild winter and a warm and dry spring.
Already, many crabs are big and full, their claw arms deep blue on the undersides, their walking and swimming legs a lighter blue.
In the beds of submerged vegetation, the hatch of last spring will be molting to close to legal size. In another month, they surely will be so, and the females, painted orange on their claws, will be molting a final time and the mate will be in full swing.
The basic legal limits to unlicensed recreational crabbing are simple:
* The season runs from April 1 to Dec. 31.
* Seines not exceeding 50 feet in length and which are drawn up in the water may be used, as may dip nets, hand lines, open-hoop-type net traps, crab pots (check county for number and placement), trotlines of no more than 500 feet per boat or as many as five collapsible traps per person.
* An egg bearing (sponge) crab may not be kept.
* A trotline cannot be set within 50 feet of another trotline.
* The minimum size limits are five inches for hard crabs, 3 1/2 inches for soft crabs and three inches for peelers.
