March/April 2008

Timeless Tangier

The watermen who make their living on Tangier can't imagine doing anything else but crabbing.

By Mary Burnham

Freddie Wheatley leans over the starboard side of his workboat idling in Tangier Sound and hooks a buoy line with a long pole. He runs the line through a pulley and the hydraulic “pot-puller” quickly brings up the wire mesh trap containing about a dozen hardshell blue crabs.

The mate behind him grabs the pot and hoists it onto the wide, flat stern of the Chesapeake deadrise—a wooden boat first designed in the 1880s just for this business.

He quickly empties the crabs into a metal washtub, stuffs several large “oyes” (menhaden fish) into the bait compartment, and throws the pot back just seconds before Wheatley snatches up another line. The long pot hook comes within inches of the younger man’s head, but neither seems concerned.

“Do you ever get hit in the head with the pole?” I shout over the noise of the pot-puller, only half joking. “At least once a day,” he replies with a sly smile.

Wheatley runs forward into the boat’s pilothouse to speed the engine to the next group of his color-coded buoys. He idles the engine and hustles back to his place.

Speaking barely a word, the two men work quickly and in unison—a well-choreographed sequence they repeat more than 400 times a day, six days a week, in all kinds of weather.

Fortunately, it’s a bright summer day in Tangier Sound, 12 miles out in the Chesapeake Bay. The sun casts diamonds off the dark blue water of the deep harbor. About a half mile off, the white buildings of the fishing community of about 600 people glisten in the bright sun.

On a short break, I ask Wheatley how long he’s been crabbing. “I started working summers with my father in fourth grade, then full time out of high school in 1975,” he says. He had this deadrise built in 1989, naming it “Cynthia Lou” for his wife.

As demanding as the job is, he can’t imagine doing anything else. “I love being out on the water. Even if I was young, I’d do it again.”

By noon they’ve already been at this for eight hours and have pulled up most of Wheatley’s 450 pots.

For the rest of this story, see the July/August  issue of ‘Hampton Roads Magazine,’ currently available on newsstands.