Blue Crab Population Slowly Rebounding
Stricter Regulations Turning the Tide, But Industry Is Frail as Season Nears

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 24, 2006

The boats themselves, propped up and freshly painted, could tell the story.

"Faith" and "Survivor," "Liquid Asset" and "Maybe Baby" were lined up across a dusty boatyard along the Chesapeake Bay.

On April 1, the blue crab season opens, and on Hoopers Island, home to crabbers and fishermen for generations, these names describe the mood: If there is optimism, it is cautious, and if there is work, it will be hard.

The bay's crab population is far smaller than it once was, and crabbers labor under a net of regulations designed to stem the decrease.

"It's what they used to call a crying time," said Joe Hayden, 42, who has pulled crabs out of the water since he was 8. "That's what this job is . . . a crying time."

But after bottoming out about six years ago, the population of blue crabs and crabbers' harvests have tended to grow.

State biologists in Maryland and Virginia are wrapping up the annual winter dredge survey -- a sampling of 1,500 sites in the bay -- which they expect will show a stable, if not growing, population.

"We're going to have another good influx of crabs," said Lynn Fegley, director of the blue crab program at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "Last year, we had the largest influx of juvenile crabs that we've seen since 1997. . . . We still have that elevated influx of young crabs."

Some attribute the increase to a mild winter and, to a lesser extent, state regulations that limit watermen's access to crabs. At the height of the season in the fall, there were so many crabs that some watermen had difficulty finding buyers, and the abundant supply depressed prices.

"The biggest controlling factor on the crab population is Mother Nature," said Jack Brooks, president of the J.M. Clayton seafood company, a crab-picking plant in Cambridge on Maryland's Eastern Shore. "We've not had a whole lot of snowstorms or icing of the bay or rivers, and really it's been actually dry. With the combination of all those things, it sets up really, really nice for a good crab season."

The estimate of 487 million crabs in the bay last year does not approach the roughly 751 million of a decade ago. On Hoopers Island alone, several crab-picking houses have closed in recent years. Of the 6,000 licensed crabbers in Maryland, about 1,500 are earning a living from their catch. Other watermen have taken up jobs driving trucks or fishing for scallops in the Atlantic.

By the late 1990s, the dwindling of the crab population had begun to cause real alarm.

"It got to the point where 2000 rolled around, and there was just a lot of concern about whether this fishery would stay alive," Fegley said. "We decided we needed to decrease the rate of removal by 15 percent to make the population sustainable."

Crabbers are allowed to catch crabs for no more than eight hours a day and must take one day off a week. The limits on the size of crabs that can be caught and where they can be caught have been tightened.

Some watermen accept the rules grudgingly.

"It's not like it's been in its heyday, because of the pollution and all that, but I think it's on its upbeat. I hope so," said fourth-generation waterman Roger Morris, who crabs in Virginia and Maryland and was hired by the Department of Natural Resources to use his boat in the winter dredge survey. "The restrictions we're under now have helped a bit now. I'm a waterman, and I never thought I'd say that."

Down the road on Hoopers Island, Joe Hayden and his two sons were scraping barnacles off their crab pot buoys and applying a fresh coat of green paint. Hayden's assessment of state rules was not so generous.

"The DNR is putting so many regulations on us that you're going to quit. This is going to be a job of the past," he said. "I should be able to work when I want to work."

And all the time, he said, his costs keep rising. He needs to borrow money each year to cover the $5,000 he spends to maintain his gear. He needs boxes of zinc bars to provide the anodes that keep his 800 mesh-wire crab pots from corroding in the saltwater. He needs to buy paint and rope and buoys and pay for never-ending repairs on his 32-foot workboat, the "Joey Joel."

His son, Joey Hayden Jr., 19, thought that baseball might be a way off the water. He showed promise as shortstop at Cambridge-South Dorchester High School, played briefly on an exhibition team in Europe and still harbors hopes of entering the minor leagues. He tried nine months at Hagerstown Community College but concluded, "School just wasn't for me."

"They tell us to get off the water. But I'm going to give it a whirl, anyway," he said, standing in his back yard, a rooster crowing and a dog barking, the whitecaps on the green water visible in the distance.

"I like the outdoors. I don't want to be in a closed environment, in an office. I'm just hoping one day I'll hit the lottery, and I won't have to do this stuff."