Watermen fear for livelihoods with season off the water

NORFOLK

Each winter for the past 30 years, Robert Hollowell has dredged crabs from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and sold them up and down the East Coast.

A waterman and lifelong Norfolk resident, Hollowell, 67, has counted on the income to make ends meet, raise a family and maintain his famous old fishing vessel, the Ella-K, built in 1918.

Come December, though, Hollowell will probably be staying home, along with the other 53 crab-dredgers in Virginia. The state is shutting down the fishery as part of a wider plan to restore crab stocks in the Bay.

It will be the first time in more than 100 years that Virginia watermen will not catch crabs this way - by dragging a steel dredge, which resembles a big rake, from the side of their boats through muddy bottom in the lower Chesapeake. There, millions of crabs, most of them females, are hibernating.

As he walked the deck of the Ella-K, which he pulled out of the water last week, Hollowell spoke bitterly Friday about the decision to end winter dredging. He blamed special interests and "dumb politics" for putting his livelihood - and vessel - in jeopardy.

"I'd like to sell her to the governor," he said, "since he's the one who's putting us out of business."

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and his Maryland counterpart, Gov. Martin O'Malley, committed in the spring to reducing the harvest of female crabs by 34 percent in 2008.

The goal, favored by environmentalists, wildlife managers and scientists, is to give more females an opportunity to spawn and thus increase the chances of a population rebound.

The Baywide stock has been steadily declining for a decade, according to scientific estimates. The two governors said that without fast and meaningful action, they feared a collapse of the mid-Atlantic's most renowned seafood resource.

Maryland has been pushing for an end to winter dredging in Virginia for decades, arguing that it removes millions of pregnant females from the population before they can release their eggs in spring.

Virginia has resisted until now, saying the harvest from December through March is relatively small - about 10 percent of the overall catch - and has little impact on the health of the species.

But in designing a strategy this spring to cut harvests by 34 percent, officials with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission determined that they could reach half that goal by banning winter dredging. So they did.

"We understand the economic impacts and are working to mitigate them, but we're very comfortable we made the right decision," said John Bull, a spokesman for the marine commission.

John McConaugha, a crab expert and scientist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk and a voting member of the commission, called the move "kind of a no-brainer."

"Biologically, it's going to make a fairly large contribution," he said, "with an economic impact on a relatively small number of watermen."

Without the shutdown, McConaugha and others said, the state would have had to make more drastic cuts that would have hurt more crabbers.

Watermen are challenging the dredging decision in court and have filed a civil lawsuit in Norfolk Circuit Court. The plaintiff in the case is Hollowell.

"I'm doing this for all the watermen in Virginia," Hollowell said. "It's time we take a stand, before they get rid of all of us and close us all down."

The suit alleges that only the Virginia General Assembly is empowered to close the fishery and that the marine commission acted illegally in April in doing so. It seeks to resume dredging until lawmakers in Richmond say otherwise.

The state is attempting to throw the case out of court on technical grounds, according to records.

No hearing date has been scheduled, even though the suit was filed in June, and Hollowell said he fears the state will delay the suit until after dredging season starts Dec. 1.

Crab dredging has gradually declined on its own in the past two decades. The job is cold, difficult and dangerous. And as fuel costs have increased, Hollowell said, most dredgers "have simply stopped going out or have died off."

In 1986, dredging accounted for 26 percent of the Virginia catch, or more than 27 million crabs, according to state statistics. In 2006, dredgers caught about 6.9 million crabs, or about 10 percent of the harvest.

Twenty years ago, more than 300 watermen went dredging; this year, 53 were expected to go.

Hollowell said that if he loses in court, he likely will go fishing this winter for sea bass, "if the weather is all right."

As for the Ella-K, Hollowell said he will do everything he can to hold onto the ship, which has been in his family since 1977.

"But who knows?" he said. "I mean, what's the use of having a dredge boat if you can't dredge?"

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com