HOURS BEFORE DAYBREAK I’M ABOARD LONNIE MOORE’S thirty-two-foot deadrise, Alona Rahab, headed out of the shanty-lined channel into Tangier Sound. A hard rain is falling, and its drops catch fire in the beam of a powerful spotlight on the cabin’s roof. Beyond them, all is black: Clouds smother the moon, and at 3:50 A.M. the few lights burning onshore hide behind a heavy curtain of mist. The way ahead is an impenetrable blank. Undaunted by the heavy chop, Lonnie opens the throttle, the diesel roars, the bow rises high, and we shoot bucking and thumping into the wind and confused water beyond the P’int.
We’re bound for Lonnie’s hard crab pots, 425 of them strung in three-mile rows off the Eastern Shore, the nearest about ten miles from home. With us are Isaiah McCready and Cameron Evans, two rising high school juniors beginning their ninth day as Lonnie’s crew. Still adjusting to the early hours, Isaiah dozes in a small berth shoehorned into the boat’s forepeak. A yawning Cameron and I struggle to keep our feet on the cabin’s rolling, shuddering deck.
Lonnie is hunched in his chair behind the wheel, eyes locked on radar, GPS, and depth finder, rocking with the hard thumps that accompany our collisions with water churned by wind blowing the other way. We’re taking it “right in the painter holes,” as Tangiermen say, but rather than slow down, he brings our speed up to nineteen knots. The boat’s short nose plows into a wave, and a thick tongue of water arcs over the windows and the spotlight, filling the cabin with a weird blue-green light.
“Ride ’em, cowboy!” Lonnie shouts over the diesel’s noisy throb. “We got a little wind out here. The forecast was for less than ten knots out of the south, but it’s blowing harder than that.” We hit a wave, and I feel my spine compress. “About twenty, it feels like to me,” Lonnie says, peering through the glass. “We got flood tide and we still got whitecaps, so about twenty, I’d say.” Translation: The southerly wind is blowing with the tide, rather than against it, and still the sound is foaming.
The boat dives into a wave, and another huge scoop of water sweeps over the cabin. On the GPS I see that we’re rounding the southern tip of Watts Island. We rattle and thud east into Pocomoke Sound’s middle, then turn due south. Up ahead, a channel marker’s red light flashes weakly through the rain. Lonnie adjusts his radar to zoom in on our location and, at 4:25 A.M., cuts the engine. Isaiah crawls blinking from the berth. We’re three miles west–southwest of the entrance to Onancock Creek. So say the instruments. The Eastern Shore is invisible, as is everything else beyond the cabin’s fogged windows.
“Get your sea legs, boys,” the captain tells his crew. “It’s rockin’ and rollin’.” Indeed, heavy swells are moving beneath us, tilting the boat fifteen degrees one way, then the other. He flips a switch and three spotlights bathe the rear deck with stark white light. With each roll, water slaps the boat’s sides and geysers up past the gunwales. “Think I should wear my coat?” Cameron asks.
Lonnie squints at the pelting rain visible in the spotlights, the water sloshing up the boat’s sides. “Up to you,” he says. “You’ll definitely be getting some spray. That’s for sure.” He slips his oilskins over his shoes, hoists them up over his pants legs, untangles the shoulder straps. “I’m going to start out without mine,” he says. “I’d rather be wet from the salt than wet from sweat.” Cameron nods his agreement. Suited up, the three step from the humid cabin to the windswept, pitching deck. A sunshade over most of the boat’s work area offers little protection from rain blowing sideways. Lonnie strides to the rear steering station, Cameron takes up position just astern of him, and Isaiah organizes bushel baskets in the deck’s middle. Then, wordlessly—which is the way Captain Alonza J. Moore III prefers to work—they launch into a complex but fluid choreography.
Step one: Lonnie works the engine and transmission to bring the boat alongside a buoy. He drops the engine to idle, hooks the float out of the water, and loops the line through a motorized puller, which he activates with a pedal. Wheels spin, the device whines, and in two seconds, maybe three, fifty feet of line piles up next to Cameron and the pot breaks the surface. Lonnie lifts it aboard, sets it upside down on the gunwale, and unlatches the bait hatch on its bottom.
Step two: As Lonnie engages the transmission and the boat eases forward, Cameron seizes the pot, flips it over, releases its bungee closure, and shakes the catch into a galvanized metal tub on deck. He then closes the pot, flips it back upside down, grabs a couple of menhaden from a cardboard box at the stern, and stuffs the fish into the wire cylinder that forms the pot’s bait box. He re-latches the hatch and tosses the pot overboard, throwing the piled line and buoy after it.
Step three: While Lonnie snags the next pot, Isaiah culls the catch, plucking crabs from the tub and tossing each into the appropriate bushel basket. He has to move fast, as Lonnie has refined this routine to a lean efficiency, and the time between pots averages little more than a minute. With that in mind, tenacious crabs that cling to the wire mesh are left in the pots—the Alona Rahab’s crew will get them tomorrow—and Lonnie has custom-fitted the boat with features that streamline his movements: After threading the line into the puller, for instance, he slips his hook into two homemade brackets, where it waits for the next pot. Its placement is so ergonomically natural that he can grab it without looking.
Likewise, he uses a steering stick in place of a wheel because it’s faster. Pushing it forward turns the boat right, and pulling it, left. He rarely has to give it more than a tap, an economy that saves seconds per pot. Working the stick, the transmission, and the pedal has become so intuitive, he says, that if he thought about what he was doing, he wouldn’t be able to do it.
We work south along the row, the visible world defined by the spotlights: water deep green and fizzing, slapping loudly against the boat’s sides; the tossing deck turning slick with mud, red moss, bits of crab, and rain, which is slanting aboard on the gusting wind; and flashes of white as gulls stalking us for handouts cross the field of light. A pot comes aboard with fifteen crabs crowded inside. “Look at that!” Lonnie hollers.
But it’s an anomaly. Most of the pots bring just one or two crabs. As the sky brightens to a steely gray, Lonnie brings the hundredth pot aboard. “A quarter down,” he says, and nods toward the catch so far: two bushels of clean sooks, nearly a bushel of lemons, and half bushels of number ones and twos, along with a few peelers he’ll sell to Ooker. “Not too good.”
“It’s the moss,” he tells me. “When you have a lot of moss, you don’t get any crabs.” Many of the pots are choked with the algae, which here seems blonder than the variety Ooker’s found in the waters just off Tangier. If Lonnie were a peeler potter, a little of it might work in his favor—a crab about to molt is seeking sanctuary, after all, and the growth makes a dark cave of a wire pot. Hard crabs steer clear, however. “Yesterday there was no moss here. We caught a lot of crabs,” Lonnie says. “But it was so bad a couple weeks ago I had to bring a power washer and clean the pots as I went. Couldn’t even see into the pots.”
We’ve worked our way three miles down the Eastern Shore, which in the predawn, rain-shrouded gloom is taking shape as a dark, uneven line to our east. Normally, Lonnie would head that way to the southern end of his next row, off the mouth of Pungoteague Creek, and follow it back to the north. But now, as we idle broadside to the waves, the air on deck pungent with brine, old crab, and diesel exhaust, he decides to change tactics. We’ll speed up to the north end of the rows, away (he hopes) from all this moss, then work our way back down, nose to the wind. We return to the cabin. Lonnie opens the throttle.
THE ECONOMICS OF HARD POTTING leave little room for a poor day’s catch. Compared with a peeler potter, Lonnie Moore has a lot of overhead to cover before he breaks even: He deploys more than twice as many pots, which are fashioned from heavier wire than those for catching peelers and more expensive. Because he plants them in deeper water farther from shore, those pots require a lot more line—which boosts their cost considerably—and he loses more of them to storms and boat traffic. His fuel costs are steeper, for while Ooker’s farthest-flung pot is rarely more than five miles from his shanty, Lonnie’s closest is twice that distance from home. He has to buy bait, which isn’t cheap at two fish per pot, or 850 a day. He must pay his teenage crew $70 per boy per day, or a total out of pocket of $840 per six-day week.
In sum, he must catch $400 of crab on the average summer day before he actually earns his first penny. Early in the season and again in the fall, that daily break-even point rises to $500, because the boys are in school and he has to take on an adult crew, and because the razor clams favored as bait in cooler months are more expensive.
This is not, in other words, an undertaking for the weak of heart. It requires him to charge hard every day, weather be damned, and fatigue and sickness, too. It demands his complete commitment to minimizing costs and maximizing his catch. And regardless of how lean his operation or how good his luck, his success largely rides on the decisions of others, for like every crabber on Tangier he has no say in the price his crabs will bring. With the season now well under way and crabs plentiful, the crab houses are paying far less than they did six weeks ago: Number ones have dropped from $100 a bushel to $65, number twos and clean sooks from $50 to half that much, and lemons from $20 to $16.
Which makes Lonnie’s choice to follow the water all the more remarkable, because for more than half of his working life, he was on the payroll of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, first as a boat captain, then as boss over all the foundation’s island programs, and later as the commander of its fleet. He chose to leave that job—and the security of a paycheck, retirement account, and predictable hours—to return to working the water after almost twenty-five years away.
Unlike most Tangier crabbers, Lonnie didn’t follow his father into crabbing. He was born in November 1954 to Edna Sears—the daughter of the island’s first and best-known innkeeper, Hilda Crockett—and A. J. “Junior” Moore, a World War II veteran who worked for the island’s electric utility and served many years as postmaster. Lonnie also pursued land-based employment, at least at first. He worked construction for a while, then built boats with Jerry Frank Pruitt. But three years after quitting school in the eleventh grade, he was drawn to the independence and money that crabbing promised. He crewed for others for two years, then had Jerry Frank build him a forty-two-foot box-stern deadrise that he named This’ll Do, after a beach cottage his grandfather had kept when Lonnie was a boy.
Jerry Frank charged him about $8,000 for the boat. Fully outfitted, his rig cost about $21,000, he says, “and you could go to the bank and get a loan to pay for every penny of it.” It didn’t seem a bargain at the time, but nowadays it would cost six times as much, easy, and because the uncertainties of working the water have made lenders skittish, most or all of it would have to be cash.
In 1986, after potting for ten years in This’ll Do, Lonnie had a much bigger boat built—forty-seven feet long and fourteen abeam—designed to withstand the harsh conditions of winters at sea. He named it for Carol, whom he’d married in 1981, and their daughter, Loni Renee, born the following year. The Loni Carol proved a fortuitous upgrade four years later, when Lonnie got his captain’s license and Coast Guard certification to carry passengers, and he went to work for CBF as the captain of its Port Isobel facility on the P’int. The boat was big and seaworthy enough to carry a classroom of kids on educational outings.
At the time, the foundation wasn’t winning any popularity contests on Tangier, and Lonnie’s fellow crabbers were mystified by his decision. “It wasn’t like I wasn’t making a living on the water,” he says. But by then he and Carol had had a second child, a boy named Alex, born in 1988, and here was economic security—and he also saw the job as a platform for advocacy on behalf of watermen, as well as the bay and its wildlife.
Early on, during the two years he worked at Port Isobel and the dozen he spent managing the foundation’s island programs at the P’int, Smith Island, and Fox Island, it was exactly that. But the organization changed, Lonnie says: It grew slick, corporate and political, he believed, and less receptive to the bay’s commercial users. “CBF used to side with the watermen occasionally,” he says. “Now they always side with the fish, oysters, and crabs.” Even as overt hostility between the group and Tangier eased, Lonnie’s disenchantment deepened—until, halfway through his ten years as fleet senior manager, “I hated the job,” he says. “I hated going to work. We had people on staff I couldn’t trust. Carol kept telling me to quit.” And so he did, in 2014.
He sold the Loni Carol to the foundation and bought the Alona Rahab, which is named for his granddaughters and could fit inside his old boat. Because he’d been inactive as a crabber, the state restricted him to a “little” hard crab license, authorizing him to set only eighty-five pots—a number well shy of what he’d need to earn a living, even working by himself. He traded that license and $5,000 to another crabber for a “medium” hard crab license, good for 255 pots. Early in 2016, he traded that medium license and $12,000 for the biggest license issued in Virginia, for 425 pots, and spent another $3,000 for a peeler license to keep his options open. He’s thus invested $20,000 in paperwork.
Which grants him the privilege to venture onto the bay to attempt the near impossible.
BY 6:50 A.M. we’re on the second row, working south from the mouth of Onancock Creek under a leaden sky. My phone reports the temperature as seventy-six degrees, but it feels far cooler in the undiminished wind sweeping over the boat from the southwest. The sound is empty save for a single deadrise a half mile off to starboard. Lonnie identifies it with a glance as the Henrietta C., a fine wooden boat built by Jerry Frank and belonging to Ed Charnock.
Cameron and Isaiah have switched roles, so that Isaiah is now dumping the pots. Not that there’s much to dump: Over the next twenty minutes we top off a bushel of number ones and another of clean sooks, but the red moss is worse here than it was down south. One pot after another comes up slimed and empty. Lonnie, flummoxed, decides we’ll head back down to Pungoteague. “This is what I hate to do,” he mutters as we speed down the coast, “run from one end to the other and find it doesn’t work.”
We arrive at the south end of the 120-pot row. Through the mist I can see the Pungoteague Light standing at the mouth of its namesake creek. It’s a caisson-style tower built of iron and shaped like a spark plug, its bottom planted in the bay’s floor and weighted in place with concrete. The bay is home to several such lights, which have stood sentry over its shoals for more than a century. This one dates to 1908.
The years have not been kind. As we draw closer I see that the light has been sheared in half, its lantern destroyed, its mangled stump no aid to navigation, but a hazard. A marker planted nearby warns sailors away. I ask Lonnie what caused such vandalism. His answer: “Ice.”
Some winters freeze parts of the sounds east of Tangier, and on rare occasion the Chesapeake locks up from shore to shore. Ice halts the mailboat and the grocery store’s weekly runs, and when it lingers, it infuses the island with a frenetic claustrophobia. And freezes can last far longer than the bay’s temperate latitudes would suggest they might: The record, set in the winter of 1917–18, is fifty-two days. Another weeks-long siege in 1977 piled ice in immense blocks two stories high along the island’s west side, and it froze so thick that several young Tangiermen were able to walk more than two miles across the frozen bay to an old World War II Liberty ship sunk in the open water. Some even rode their bikes.
In the days before reliable Coast Guard icebreakers and rescue helicopters, such maroonings could usher real hardship. A break-bone freeze in January 1893 forced Tangier to pillage its larders and slaughter its livestock, and still the island suffered “great destitution,” as a news dispatch put it. A particularly harsh freeze in 1936 saw Maryland State Police attempt to replenish the island’s dwindling food supplies by trekking with sleds from Crisfield. Along the way, a state trooper broke through the ice and froze to death. Food eventually arrived by blimp.
Nowadays a frozen sound, and even a completely iced-in bay, is more inconvenience than real danger: Thanks to the airstrip, islanders need not fret about starving. But worry they might when the ice starts to break up. Pushed by wind and tide, floes become battering rams that splinter all in their path. The Pungoteague Light’s ruins commemorate a spot ravaged not once, but twice by wind-driven ice. An earlier screwpile lighthouse—essentially a cottage atop a spidery tangle of steel legs screwed into the bay’s bottom—was toppled here in February 1856, in only its second winter of service.
A long roster of Chesapeake beacons has shared that fate. Floes crushed Maryland’s Hooper Strait Light in 1877, and four years later they swept the nearby Sharps Island Light off its base and carried it five miles down the bay with its keepers trapped inside. The Solomons Lump Light, just north of Smith Island, was heaved onto its side by piled ice in 1893 and destroyed by another attack of floes two years later. Ice smashed the Janes Island Light outside Crisfield in 1879, heavily damaged its replacement in 1893, and took down the repaired light for good in 1935.
Seeing as how floes can obliterate structures built to withstand hurricanes, they’ve had little trouble wreaking havoc on Tangier’s fragile shoreline. More than wind, more than waves, moving ice grinds away sandy beach, tears great bites from upland sod, bulldozes huge tumps of marsh into the bay. From the first days of settlement, Tangiermen walked out to their island’s edges to find that freezes had left behind startling change.
At such times, the islanders couldn’t help but notice that their home was shrinking, and not just at Canaan. The whole of the island, and especially its western shore, was succumbing to nature’s assaults. But well into the twentieth century, they didn’t have a measure of just how much was lost or at what rate. And during years when the water didn’t freeze and storms didn’t pound the shore, they put the matter out of their minds.
THERE WAS PLENTY MORE to think about, for change was coming to Tangier fast. In 1928, islanders rigged up a diesel generator on the Main Ridge to wires crisscrossing the island and created a primitive electrical utility. The system ran on direct current, which required special equipment if a householder were to use industry-standard lights, radios, or appliances, and its load capacity was so limited that it was fired up for only a few hours each evening, from about 5:00 to 10:30 P.M. Most Tangiermen chose to stick with their kerosene lamps. Still, the town acquired a smattering of dim streetlights, and its gathering places enjoyed safe, clean, reliable light through the long winters.
That same year, an Illinois-born waterman living in Harryhogan, a village on Virginia’s western shore, received a patent for the wire-mesh crab pot. Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Lewis was pushing seventy and had spent decades trotlining crabs, when he rebelled against its taxing labor and meager yields. One hot July day in the twenties, he abandoned his trotline in the Yeocomico River and, as his son, Harvey, later recounted, sat for several hours under a tree in his yard, so deep in thought that he “didn’t even hear Mom when she called him to dinner.
“Later he went to the shed and got his snips and told me to go to the store for some chicken wire,” Harvey said. “Then he began to cut out pieces and fuss with ’em. That’s all he did all that summer.” The result was an early version of the pot: a cube of wire mesh on a heavier wire frame, with a tapering funnel built into two sides and a cylinder for bait in its bottom. Crabs entering the pot through the funnels had a hard time finding their way back out. Lewis patented the design in 1928, before he was fully satisfied with the invention, and for years fiddled with refinements.
The key improvement was based on the principle that if a crab feels itself trapped, it will usually respond by running downhill on the bottom or swimming upward. Lewis installed a wire-mesh wall dividing the pot into upper and lower rooms. He cut a mouth-shaped slit in its middle and curled the ends of the snipped wire upward, forming a one-way passage. A crab entered the trap through one of the funnels, or “throats,” then—finding itself trapped in the “downstairs”—swam up through the passage into the “parlor,” where escape was next to impossible.
Lewis received a patent for the refined device in 1938, and it wasn’t long before Tangier watermen first encountered one. Elmer Crockett, the island crabber saved from electrocution by Half-Ass Buck, described the moment in journalist Larry Chowning’s book Barcat Skipper: While trotlining in Mobjack Bay on the western shore, Crockett saw a pair of crabbers each bring in ten barrels of crabs—something like thirty-three bushels—on a day when he’d had rotten luck. “I could see they didn’t have a trotline rig in their boats,” he said, so early one morning he followed one who “went out a short distance into the Mobjack and started pulling on a rope tied to an oyster stake that was marking oyster grounds. By golly, he pulled up a wire cage that was solid full of crabs.” Later, Crockett approached the potter, who cheerfully “showed me one and let me use one for a sample so I could make my own. It was the first crab pot I’d ever seen.”
Crockett made thirteen pots in the space of two days, and his “partners soon saw I was making all the money. They also went and got some wire, and I showed them how to make the pots.” Not long after, “the boys and I decided to take the pots home to Tangier and see how they would do over there. We were the first to bring the crab pot to Tangier.”
The invention was transformative. Trotlining quickly fell out of favor in Virginia and survives today only in those shallow Maryland waters where pots have been outlawed as hazards to boat traffic. The pots Lonnie uses are little changed from Lewis’s 1938 design, save for two additional throats, giving the pot one in each side, and cull rings—holes 2⅜ inches wide—cut into the pot’s parlor, enabling undersized crabs to escape.
Another big change came to the island not long after Elmer Crockett and his buddies encountered that first pot, and it resulted from ice and the hardships it brought: In October 1940, the Federal Communications Commission authorized the creation of a radiotelephone link between Tangier and the mainland, citing freeze-ups through the thirties that had cut off the island from the outside world. Four telephones were installed on Tangier: one at the electric plant, two in stores, and one in the home of a prominent member of the Swain congregation. Picking up the receiver connected the caller by radio with an operator in Crisfield, who spliced the call into the mainland telephone system. Receiving a call was a little more complicated. If the recipient didn’t know the call was coming, it might take a while for someone to round him up.
Over the next twenty-six years, the four telephones became fifteen coin-operated phone booths. But they still relied on the radio circuit, still worked best for outgoing calls, and were party lines—meaning an islander might not be able to make a call until a neighbor in another booth finished his.
But then, Tangiermen were inured to the limitations of technology. In 1944 their jury-rigged electric generator gave up the ghost, after sixteen years of service. The island lacked the money to replace it, so everyone went back to using kerosene.
BACK ON THE ALONA RAHAB, it’s eight A.M. and we’re nearing the north end of the row. Each pot rises from the bottom more tangled with red moss than the last. Most contain only a crab or two, and few of any size; in several, I see small crabs desperately trying to squeeze through the cull rings. “Yeah, there’s more moss,” Lonnie says, sighing as we motor east to his third row. “I’m hoping this south wind will carry it all above us tomorrow.”
We start south. The wind comes up, and over the next half hour the seas build. A brief eruption of hard rain spatters the deck and the crew. Between pots, and over the noise of the puller, Lonnie and I attempt an oft-interrupted conversation—about the hazards that attend work on the water, the precautions one can take to improve his odds of returning to port, the sometimes harsh hand of fate. Lonnie spends a lot of money keeping the Alona Rahab in good condition. He’s near fanatical about preventative maintenance. But sometimes things happen, he says, that you can’t prepare for: chains of misfortunes that happen just so, small accidents that occur at precisely the worst moment.
He speaks from experience. On April 19, 1991, he was alone aboard the Loni Carol and under way at a good clip up near the red bell buoy that marks the approximate halfway point between Tangier and Crisfield, when he went aft to check something at the stern. He tripped as he walked and plunged headfirst off the end of the boat.
The water temperature was fifty-five degrees. Wind was out of the northeast at thirty miles per hour, and the seas were heavy—so much so that Tangier’s watermen had stayed in that day—so the prospects for rescue were slim as Lonnie watched the Loni Carol motor away.
The tide was outbound. Together with the winds, it propelled him southward, and he had no choice but to go with it. Numbed and confused by the cold, losing strength by the minute, he bobbed along for two hours. “I was hallucinating,” he says. “I didn’t have five minutes left. I was just floating. I couldn’t move my arms to swim anymore. I was gone.”
Then, in an occurrence that defied almost impossible odds, two Tangiermen headed to the mainland on a beer run happened to notice something afloat in all that rough water and swung around for a closer look. He remembers being hoisted aboard, then waking up in an ambulance. Most, if not all, Tangier watermen have fallen overboard at some point. Few have been so unlucky as to face the combination of circumstances that nearly killed Lonnie. Fewer still have benefitted from the kind of blind, stupid luck that saved him.
The bad run he’s experienced today is minor in comparison, but it persists. We encounter more red moss on the last row and run out of bait before we’ve finished it. Lonnie steers the boat for home with the day’s efforts inked in red.
The wind persists as well. A few days later I reach the Situation Room ahead of everyone but Leon, who readies a pot of coffee and, while it drips, sits staring at me over his glasses. “Rough this morning,” he says. “It blowed hard.”
Jerry Frank Pruitt enters. “Did you go today?” Leon asks him.
“Yeah,” Jerry Frank says. “It was blowing today. Blowing right good.”
“Blowed hard there, this morning,” Leon agrees. “Came right around to the southeast.”
“Yeah, it was blowing hard, all right,” Jerry Frank says. “I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t have to come in, but I was able to stay out, and right after the sun come up, it settled down.”
A lengthy discussion of wind ensues. Ooker bursts in the room. “Somebody let me know,” he hollers. “Is it going to blow a gale every morning?”
So it seems. A few days later, a squall packing sixty-knot winds tears over the island, toppling stacked crab pots off their docks and into the harbor, scattering boating gear and yard furniture, swamping skiffs. A few evenings on, still another gale broadsides the island from the west. It shoves the water in Onancock Creek upstream and over the banks, flooding the town wharf. Salt water swirls two feet deep around my parked car, rendering it a total loss.
Between blows, the island broils in a wave of Burmese heat. One Sunday morning, a big, burly tugboat crewman named Paulie McCready opens the service at New Testament Church with: “Good morning—this beautiful, hot morning.” The congregation murmurs its weary assent. “It’s all right,” Paulie reassures his neighbors. “Ice will be here before long.”