Scenes of an Effort Impeded Unfold Across Chesapeake Watershed

"Perhaps at some point we need to begin asking ourselves . . . 'Is this voluntary approach actually getting us where we need to be?' " said L. Preston Bryant Jr., Virginia's secretary of natural resources. "That has not been the Virginia way."

Blue Crabs

Under the water now, the sooks are finishing their run.

Millions of female crabs have crawled dozens of miles south along the shoulders of the bay's deep channel, completing an astonishing and hidden migration. They will overwinter stuck in the mud, wake up when weather warms and release their eggs into the tide.

One early winter day, Adam Smith, a crabber from Shady Side in Anne Arundel County, wasn't chasing them. Instead, he was using a metal dredge to clean the bottom of the Severn River, preparing it for a state-run oyster-planting program.

The work was compensation for the new limits on the crab harvest: Maryland was, in effect, paying him and dozens of other watermen not to crab.

"Any little bit helps, these days," said Smith, 33, as he was pelted by spitball-size wads of blowing snow. "It gets a little harder each year."

In 1987, the bay cleanup promised to rebuild the Chesapeake's blue crab population. In the 1990s, Maryland and Virginia joined a "Bi-State Blue Crab Advisory Committee" and worked together to limit the harvest by upping the minimum size for catchable crabs and forcing watermen to take more time off.

But it wasn't enough: Watermen worked harder, and the crab population remained small, so that in some years more than 70 percent of the adult crabs in the bay wound up caught. That was far above 53 percent, the level considered "overfishing."

In 2003, the committee disbanded. The official reason was that Virginia could not afford its $95,000 share of the budget.

Howard R. Ernst, a political-science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who has studied the bay cleanup, said he believes the states caved to pressure from watermen, who called the harvest limits crushing. "It was killed because it worked," he said.

"Did the watermen's . . . lobbying head off major crab regulation cutbacks? . . . Yes," said John Bull, a spokesman for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. But Bull said that states also hadn't realized the severity of the crab's decline until the past couple of years. "It's understandable that we didn't go far enough," he said.

Septic Tanks

There was a problem under Eric Bentley's lawn.