HOOPERS ISLAND — HOOPERS ISLAND -- For more than a century, the blue crab has sustained life on this marshy sliver of land between the Chesapeake Bay and the Honga River. Income from the harvest pays the mortgage, the electric bill, the tab at the grocery store, even college tuition.
But islanders fear that their way of life - long made precarious by unpredictable weather, rising equipment costs and dwindling crab populations - is about to be regulated out of existence.
Last week, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced it will end the season for female crabs Oct. 23, about seven weeks early. That will slash income for crabbers here at the most lucrative time - when the female crabs are migrating along the coast of the Lower Eastern Shore to Virginia, where they spawn. The state also is imposing limits on how many bushels of females watermen can take in September and October, further cutting their income.
"The main stream of our income is this crab, and without it, we are just destroyed," said Thomas "Bubby" Powley, a crabber who also owns a crab-picking house. "There is just no way we can live with the regulations that they are suggesting."
Founded in 1667 as a farming village, Hoopers Island - actually a skinny chain of islands so close together they are almost a peninsula - was once covered with tobacco and wheat crops. But by the end of the Civil War, island men had taken up life on the water, first oystering and later crabbing. Island women picked crabmeat.
The biology of the Chesapeake Bay favored Hoopers - lots of female crabs led to processing houses with names like Phillips, Hall and Ruark, families that remain here to this day. Nine of Dorchester County's 14 seafood processors are on Hoopers Island.
But the bounty that has enriched the island now imperils it. Scientists say the female crab needs to be saved to propagate the species, and females are nearly all of what islanders catch each fall. So, while the crab restrictions will affect all watermen, they will disproportionately hurt Hoopers and the lower bay.
Natural Resources Assistant Secretary Frank Dawson acknowledges as much but says the state must take action to reduce the female crab harvest by a third to revive the species. The crab population has plummeted, a drop scientists attribute both to overfishing and the bay's poor health.
