Will a great year for Chesapeake Bay crabs mean a great year for Watermen?
At 4:41 a.m., Bubby Powley looked at his watch, looked at the thin, pink glow to the east, and looked at the dark water sliding past his boat. According to Maryland state law, he was allowed to start catching crabs exactly one hour before sunrise, and that was right . . . about . . . “Now. Dontcha think, Monroe?” Powley said, hitting a lever on a boom that lifted his first batch of the day from the Chesapeake Bay. The sprightly 66-year-old swung the basket inboard, where his culler of 42 years, Monroe Dorsey, 68, a slim cigar clenched under his white mustache, dumped a few dozen wriggling crustaceans into a fiberglass basin. It was a pretty good haul in what so far has been a very good crab harvest. Dorsey measured male after male with a plastic caliper and tossed those of five inches or more into one of the six and a half bushels Powley would sell later that day to a wholesaler. The summer is getting off to a promising start along America’s biggest estuary,,, Read the rest here 15:31
Leave a Reply