Salt in the Wounds

Chesapeake Bay's Briny Consequence of the Summer Drought Pushes Crabs From Usual Harvesting Spots

The summer drought that has ruined gardens and withered crops throughout the mid-Atlantic region has turned this year's crabbing season topsy-turvy.

Across the Chesapeake Bay's midsection, watermen say the crab harvest is the worst they've seen in decades. But those in the Chesapeake's northernmost tributaries are hitting the jackpot, finding huge numbers of fresh blue crabs.

This year's unusually cold spring and severe lack of rain have conspired to pummel the already struggling crabbing industry, which for years has seen its harvests fall and its costs soar.

"It's hit the crabbers all over the bay," said John VanAlstine, 40, a crabber and director of the Working Watermen of Anne Arundel County. "We travel to where the crabs are, and right now, the crabs aren't in a lot of places."

Scientists and Virginia and Maryland officials said this year's crabbing season, which runs from spring until late fall, seems to be yielding below-average harvests and strange patterns.

"There's definitely a weird distribution of the crabs that we have this year as a result of the climate," said Bill Goldsborough, a senior scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The season got off to a slow start this spring because the cold weather kept many crabs from leaving their winter burrows on the bay bottom. Then came this summer's drought, which appears to have altered the bay's balance between freshwater and saltwater.

Less rain means less water coming out of the rivers that feed the bay and less dilution for the saltwater that washes in from the Atlantic Ocean. This shift, officials said, meant that some of the places where crabs are usually plentiful in midsummer -- like the shores off Anne Arundel and Southern Maryland -- suddenly became too salty for the crustaceans, which sought fresher waters far from the ocean.

"What it seems to be doing, really, is pushing the crabs north to the head of the bay and up into the tributaries," said Lynn Fegley, a fisheries biologist at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Experts and watermen said crabs are plentiful in the Elk and Sassafras rivers, the Delaware Canal and the Susquehanna Flats -- sites squeezed in the northernmost corner of the bay. The crabbers are following them.

"It's as jampacked with watermen up there as I've ever seen in my life," said Steve Lay, 55, of Havre de Grace. "I'm catching more crabs than I've ever caught my entire life."

There's a perplexing pattern in the Virginia portion of the bay, where crabs seem to be missing from the middle of the bay and are more prevalent farther south, where the Chesapeake meets the Atlantic. That would not seem to make sense, because the Atlantic is where saltwater comes from. But the rains upstream in the York and James rivers have dumped more freshwater into the bay, said Joe Grist of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.