Crab restrictions cripple Tangier watermen

On late-autumn days, this tiny Chesapeake Bay island normally buzzes with workboat engines and the shouts of Tangier watermen in their Elizabethan dialect.

No more.

The docks and crab shanties on stilts lining the harbor are empty. The marine railway is a graveyard of boats laid up on oil drums for repairs that never will come. Dozens of other boats are for sale. On a recent afternoon, the only sounds in the harbor were the gulls and the horn blasts of a faraway channel buoy.

The coming winter looks bleak for Tangier, a no-nonsense outpost of watermen on a 1.7-square-mile blip in the middle of the bay. State regulators, to protect female crabs for spawning in the spring, curtailed the crab-potting season this fall and banned crab dredging, a job that has helped pay the bills on Tangier in the winter for 100 years.

"This has been my way of life for 31 years, and the state has unemployed me, taken my work away," 41-year-old Tangierman Clyde Pruitt said one recent afternoon. He listlessly dabbed paint on his dredge boat, tied to a dock piled with his 500 crab pots and his now-useless dredge.

The traditional way of life is disappearing fast on Tangier, hurried along by Virginia's efforts to prevent the blue crab population from collapsing.

Crab dredging has been a dying business almost everywhere except Tangier, whose fleet of 13 dredge boats is one of the largest on the bay. Dredges are heavy iron rakes, dragged along the bottom to collect millions of hibernating female crabs, most of them pregnant, for sale mostly in big cities on the East Coast. Last week, a Norfolk judge refused to keep open the dredging season, which would begin tomorrow.

The new crab restrictions are part of a larger effort by Virginia and Maryland to reduce the catch of female crabs in the bay by 34 percent. Since 1991, the Virginia crab catch has plunged from 450 million pounds to 120 million, scientists say, and a survey last winter showed a 16 percent drop in the numbers of adult crabs from the previous year.

The federal government has promised $10 million in emergency aid for Virginia watermen. The state is considering work programs that would pay watermen to plant aquatic grasses and round up long-abandoned crab pots, known as "ghost pots."

But Tangier's ills go deeper.

The island's population stands at 544, 100 fewer than three years ago. People died or quit working on the water and moved to the mainland. No one is replacing them; none of the eight high school seniors at Tangier's only school plans to stick around. The first three grades contain a total of 11 students.

"We're becoming a ghost town," said Tangier's mayor, James Eskridge, a 56-year-old waterman whose ancestors came to the island from Fredericksburg in the 1860s to escape the Civil War.

Most Tangiermen used to be watermen, catching crabs and other seafood for big-city East Coast markets. But since 2000, the ranks of the island's watermen have thinned from 170 to 65, said Cindy Parks, who works for the Virginia Marine Resource Commission on Tangier. The state's well-intentioned cutoff of new commercial fishing licenses in the 1990s effectively blocked future generations of Tangiermen from following their fathers onto the water, she said. "It signed Tangier's death warrant."

The VMRC's decision last week to freeze the crabbing licenses of any watermen who did not crab between 2004 and 2007 is certain to cut more Tangiermen's ties to the water.

Dozens of Tangiermen have tied up their workboats and gone to work on oceangoing tugboats, guiding oil barges up and down the East Coast. Islanders call it "going on the tug."

Tug work pays well and offers health benefits -- a novelty for many Tangiermen. But the tugs stay at sea for two-week intervals, and the mass absences of the crewmen are felt keenly on close-knit Tangier, where women often work in the home or teach school.

At times, it's difficult to muster a volunteer fire crew or fill the seats at an after-school event.

The watermen's problems reverberate through the island. "If a man can't crab, he can't buy as many groceries," said Joanne Daley, co-owner of Daley and Sons Grocery, Tangier's only remaining grocery store.

Many Tangiermen see little choice but to dig in and live on less.

"I'm 56 years old with a high school education, and I've been a waterman all my life," said Chuck Pruitt, who runs the Double Six, a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop where the island's watermen gather around an oil stove. "What else am I going to do?"

Conversation at the Double Six used to revolve around the weather and the previous day's catch. Now it's mostly complaints about the resources commission and Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, and the efforts of scientists to understand the blue crab. "We're being regulated to death by people who don't know squat about the water business," Eskridge said.

He said crab catches in Tangier were phenomenal in the days before the commission curtailed the season, citing scarcity. The commission says any glut of crabs in Tangier did not extend throughout the bay.

Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey said the governor "certainly understands the watermen's plight, but he thinks action had to be taken for the long-term health of the bay."

Commissioner Kyle Schick, who operates a yacht club in Colonial Beach, said in a recent interview that he and his colleagues recognized that new crab restrictions would hurt hundreds of watermen -- particularly Tangiermen who had few other practical options.

But something had to be done to stabilize the crab population, Schick said. No matter what the watermen say, "The science is strong, and half measures won't be enough. . . . It was a very difficult decision, but it was necessary for the future of the fishery. [Crabbers'] children will have to depend on this fishery, too."

Tangier has taken gradual steps to generate tourism, which on nearby Chincoteague Island has replaced fishing as the backbone of the economy. Tangier recently opened a visitors center and a museum, and a half-dozen restaurants open to tourists when the ferries run daily in the warm weather.

The island is unlike anywhere else in Virginia. Native Tangiermen speak in a British-sounding dialect similar to that of natives of Ocracoke Island, N.C. The heart of Tangier is lined with narrow roads and modest white, wooden houses with cyclone fences surrounding the yards. Some yards serve as family cemeteries. The sun both rises and sets over the bay.

The island's prevailing conservative Christian views led the Town Council in 1999 to decline a request by a movie studio to film "Message in a Bottle," with Kevin Costner and Paul Newman, on the island. The council objected to references in the script to drinking and sex.

The island's tourist appeal is limited by its remoteness. In winter, the only access to and from Tangier is by air -- via a small airstrip -- and by the daily mail boat from Crisfield, Md., the closest point on the mainland, 13 miles away.

On a recent morning, the passengers departing Tangier on the mail boat included 17-year-old George Ligon, a graduating high school senior en route to visit Virginia Tech, which he will attend next fall. Ligon's father has gone on the tug. His mother is ready to move off the island. Even at his young age, he can feel the island world shifting.

"I can remember when every man on Tangier was a waterman, and nobody ever left," he said. "It's all changed now."

Contact Bill Geroux at (757) 498-2820 or .