![]() ![]() A number for male crabs, a number for female crabs, for juveniles, for dead crabs. What these crabbers bring back to the dock at the end of the day is not a commercial catch – but a collection of numbers, jotted down neatly in handheld notebooks. Together these winter crabbers made 1,500 dredge hauls in the Chesapeake starting in December 2013 and ending in March 2014. Down in Virginia waters, one other biologist on one other boat was doing the same. On a slow day they would dig up only five blue crabs off the bottom of Chesapeake Bay despite some 30 dredge runs, on a busy day they would haul up a couple hundred.īefore chucking their crabs overboard, Williams counted, weighed, and sexed every crab: male and female, big and small, dead or alive. For his winter crabbing, however, he was taking directions from Joe Williams, a young biologist working on the annual blue crab dredge survey run by Maryland's Department of Natural Resources. It was a classic 45-foot Chesapeake Bay workboat, and its captain was Roger Morris, a long-time waterman from Dorchester County. There was only one boat hauling up crabs in Maryland waters in the winter of 2014. On the Bay: Chesapeake Quarterly's Blog.Fellowship Experiences: A Students' Blog. ![]()
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