A Livelihood Ebbs

On two occasions, the Potomac has tried to snatch Harley, too, and the near-drownings are the lucky bookends of his life on the river. The first happened when he fell off a pier at age 6; the second came in November 2005, when he and Mike were hurled into icy water after colliding with a submerged boat. Harley was unconscious for four days and spent three weeks in the hospital.

"They pumped a liter of water out of my lungs," Harley said. He started contemplating retirement not long after, no longer convinced he was fit for the work. "I lost 32 pounds. I never did get it all back," he said.

The river has surprised in other ways, too: The day he snared $6,000 worth of striped bass (stripers, as he calls them), the piranha Mike caught and the bluest crab he's ever pulled from his pots.

Harley's family settled this stretch of the Potomac in the 1820s, he said, and they have been watermen ever since. There was money in eels, shad roe, sturgeon and rockfish. By the 1940s, when his father was teaching him to fish, sewage and other pollution choked the river. "The water would splash up and burn your eyes," he says.

Poor water quality and competition from farm-raised catfish sent more and more watermen onto land in search of work in the 1950s and 1960s. The region was booming, and Harley took a day job, too, working in the supply rooms at Fort Belvoir and the Lorton Correctional Complex, then hauling fish in the evenings. But he quit in 1973, bought a truck and some aquarium tanks, and learned he could turn a buck delivering catfish down South.

"I was making $18,000 a year working for the government," he said. "I made double that hauling fish."

Small buoys marked the location of their traps, and soon father and son were pulling up the nets and sending their contents into a furious, splashing frenzy. "There's some wild catfish!" Harley said, his face dripping with river water. The men heaved the net over the bow, spilling dozens of the dusky, whiskered creatures onto the deck as the entire boat shook with their thrashing. One blue channel catfish was three feet long and about 25 pounds, its wedge-shaped head the size of a dinner plate. A low, guttural wheeze leaked from its gills as it gasped in the warm air.

Mike retied the emptied traps and lowered them into the water. He plans to carry on the tradition after his father retires, but both men know the son is not as keen to earn a living this way. "In this business, you're always pulling or lifting," Harley said. "You'll make a living, but not much more than that."

The work has been harder for Mike since a 1998 truck accident during a trip home from a catfish delivery. The driver was killed, and Mike was thrown through the windshield, his left leg shattered. He still walks with a limp.

"I'm trying to get out of full-time fishing," said Mike, a jack-of-all-trades who fixes up houses, caters parties, splits firewood and performs other odd jobs. "Catfish take up too much of my time."

On this particular morning, the haul is good -- 300 pounds from just five traps. Mike helps his father load the crates into the back of his pickup, and the old man sets off without him for the market, their catch blanching in the sun.

On the way, Harley drives past the house where he was born, then the house his uncle built. "We all looked after each other," he says, remembering such long-gone watermen as Billy Howard, Ernest Wiley and the Shepherd brothers. They used words you don't hear anymore around Hallowing Point, boat-building terms such as "gunnel" (gunwale) and "keelston" (keel stem). "I think a lot about those guys," he says.

An hour later, Harley pulls up to Capt. White's Seafood City at the Maine Avenue market. Sunny White pays him 50 cents a pound for his fish. Then Harley gets back into his truck and heads home to mend his nets.