By Timothy B. Wheeler , tim.wheeler@baltsun.com|October 18, 2008
RUMBLEY — RUMBLEY - Dawn isn't even a rumor in the east when the Barbara J pulls away from the dock in this tiny watermen's village on the lower Eastern Shore. With his helpers napping in bunks below, Mark Somers pilots his sleek 45-foot workboat through the darkness into the Chesapeake Bay. His only companion for now is Max, a Jack Russell terrier curled up under a table in the cabin.
It promises to be sunny and warm - not ideal for catching crabs in the fall. "You want it blowing hard and cool," Somers says.
But he needs to be crabbing this day because it's shaping up to be a bitter harvest - cut short by government regulations. In an attempt to rebuild what scientists say is a perilously low population of blue crabs in the bay, state officials have decreed that female crabs may not be caught after Oct. 22.
With "sooks," or females, making up 90 percent or more of his catch this time of year, Somers says the rule will force him to stop working just as the seasonal migration of crabs down the bay reaches its peak. There won't be enough male crabs to make it worth his while to continue.
"They take and they never give back," Somers complains of government's increasingly restrictive fishing regulations.
Most years, in five or six weeks of hard work up until around Thanksgiving, Somers says, he can make a third of his annual income, fishing hundreds of submerged crab traps or "pots" strung out across miles of open water. This year, he is out before the crabs are migrating en masse because he wants to recoup a little of what he's about to lose. His expenses don't stop, he points out, including payments on the workboat named for his wife that he had built last year.
Natural resource officials acknowledge the harvest restrictions impose a hardship on watermen, especially those like Somers in the lower bay, for whom catching crabs in the fall is a staple of their livelihood. But annual surveys have indicated the bay's crab population has been depressed for years and was in jeopardy of declining even more. So Maryland and Virginia agreed to reduce the harvest of female crabs by one-third. To rebuild the stock, officials said, it was necessary to curtail the catching of females so more of them could survive to bear their young.
"We're not in the business of putting watermen out of business," says Frank Dawson, an assistant secretary of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "We're about providing a sustainable stock for a sustainable [seafood] industry." But sometimes, he says, "you don't do that without pain."
