The bay's diminishing bounty

At the turn of the 20th century, fortunes were made and lost on Chesapeake Bay oysters. But those days were long ago. Today’s oyster and crab fisheries are faced with disease and decline. Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, recently discussed the economics of a life on the water.

The crabbing season began in April. How has it gone so far?

It started off good because they had a lot of big crabs, an abundance in early spring, but that’s due to the warm winter. It’s slowed down now because this is the time of year that it always does. The crabs are shedding -- losing their shells -- and growing. It’s usually the slackest time of year.

How does this enterprise work as a business for the individual waterman? I imagine they have to buy a boat. That must be their biggest investment.

I guess so. It’s hard to put a number on it because we’ve got people that fish and crab out of small bateaus that they’ve probably got $10,000 in, and we’ve got people that fish out of boats that are worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. It depends on the rig, where they’re fishing, how far they have to travel, how big a crew they’ve got, how much ambition they’ve got, a whole gamut of things. There’s no magic number that you can put on it.

Are there any waterman that get rich doing it?

Watermen don’t work on the water to get rich. They all have to have enough money to live off of and to keep operating, but they do it because of the way of life. It’s in the area that they grew up in. Sometimes it’s the only job available to them. The other thing is, it was always the most prestigious job to have in these communities, to be a boat captain. It’s just a way of life. If it was the money, they’d be doing something else.

What does a typical waterman make in a year?

Again, it varies according to where you are, what you’re fishing and what kind of rig you’ve got. It varies from a $10,000- or $15,000-a-year job to maybe a $40,000- or $50,000-a-year job.

Somebody with a big boat that has a crew of three or four and fishes his limit of crab pots -- in the course of a season, he might sell $100,000 to $200,000 worth of crabs. You might say that he’s really making a lot of money. Well, most of that money goes right back into the economy. First, he’s got to buy his crab pots. Second, he’s got a huge bait bill he has to pay. He has a big fuel bill. He has employees he has to pay, so he’s keeping two or three families going. The money he ends up with at the end of the year is probably around $20,000. It’s a big economy that starts with that crab.

Do you have an idea of how big a business it is in the state?

I don’t have that number at my fingers here. It’s very big. Oysters alone are like $10 million [a year], and that’s way down. If you are looking at crabs, you are talking about a tremendous amount of money -- not just the crabber but the shore-side facilities, the picking houses, everything that goes with that. It’s a tremendous amount of money that goes into the economy of the state of Maryland.

Incomes are down, aren’t they? Last year was a bad one for both crabs and oysters, according to the state’s figures.

We’re used to lows and highs. We gear ourselves towards that. The problem is, for us, when government steps in and puts regulations on [catches] so that when the species returns to its normal high, we’re still held where it would be at a low.

An example is the striped bass. We’ve got a tremendous abundance of striped bass but commercially we’re not allowed to harvest them any better than we were if we had the worst low that we’ve ever had.

Every waterman is geared to do everything. He’s a crabber, he’s an eeler, he’s an oysterman, he’s a fisherman. We’re geared to harvest according to the abundance of the species, so, we’ve all got a lot of gear that we don’t use all the time. What happens when you have restrictions put on fisheries and you don’t relax those restrictions when an abundance comes back, then it’s a false shortage of stock. We can’t overcome that.

Let’s say we have a shortage of oysters. Ordinarily when you have a shortage of oysters, you have an abundance of fish, so the oysterman would all go fishing. Now we have a shortage of oysters, we have a bunch of fish but with the regulations we’re operating like we have a shortage of fish.

But they lifted the fishing moratorium for striped bass a few years ago.

They lifted the moratorium, but they kept it at such a reduced rate that we’re operating like we have a shortage of fish. That’s what’s killing us. We’re used to the species going up and down. It’s when government steps in and puts undue regulations on us [that we get hurt.]