Next comes taking the pots out to be baited and set on trotlines. A good friend of mine seems to be the first one to set his pots and thus marks out his early turf. When hauling or fishing the pots you are always in motion. After you have hauled the pot a deck hand is unhooking it from the trotline from which it is connected. He then empties it of the old bait, then empties the pot of any crabs, and then it is rebaited. The pot is then handed off to the mate who takes it and places it on the rack in the stern of the boat to be stored until the whole line has been fished. If the line was productive it is then reset on the place from which it came. Other crabbers are watching you while you haul and fish. If they see you doing well they will sometimes reset their pots alongside yours. If you have been counting then you will know that the number of people on a crab pot boat is up to three. The days wages or week’s wages are divided up into thirds. Traditionally one third for the boat, one third for the crew and one third for the skipper. Not too many use such a scale anymore. Using trotlines for crab pots is different but is still equally busy from the more traditional drop potting, where each pot has its own cork. Some of the older stakeholders who have enjoyed the bay for many seasons while yachting, motorboating, recreational and charter fishing can remember when the water would at times look like fields of bullet corks marking crab pots all set in rows. An assembled pot with rebar and zincs can cost a waterman around 40 dollars or so. More people on the water means losing more pots to more people fouling the wheels of their power boats, more people in their sail boats snagging pot warps on their rudders and keels, and some people just plain vandalizing commercial gear by cutting the warps. Charter boat captains would have line cutters installed on their rudder skegs. Doing this is actually illegal. It is called molesting commercial fishing gear. Such losses would have been lessened if only these offenders had slowed down, kept their eyes open and stayed off of the lines of corks. So back to crab potting. Now the crab potters hang around 25 or so pots on a trotline with a hawk (flag) on one end of the trot line and a cork or used beach bottle on the other end, instead of a bullet cork per pot. In the rivers and creeks where crab pots are illegal, the commercial crabbers use trot lines with bait on snoods. It can make for a slower pace to their day’s labor. The baited line is laid out early in the dark of the morning, stretched tight and allowed to set for a short while. This lets the skipper, and if he has a mate on board, get ready to run the line and harvest. While running the line there is time to cull the crabs from the previous run, talk, catch up, tell jokes, listen to the radio and try to remember who sang what song that was currently being played. Many trot liners work by themselves and will cull he crabs as they run back to the head of the line. If they have a mate he will cull into several baskets the legal keepers that are a variety of quality and sizes. The skipper turns the boat to either run the line both ways or run it one way while going with the wind. Most crabbers like to run with their lines on the sunny side. Shadows spook crabs off the bait. The weirdness to all of this is that for as long as men have been crabbing they are still outwitted by a creature that has a brain the size of well use pencil eraser. A Tangierman once told me just what a crabber can say he definitely knows about crabs. “They come. They go. They bite”. In this watercolor, you can see a cull stick with different notches in it to be used as a measure. There is just one glove, a heavy duty right-handed one. When a crab gets you with his claws it can go through even heavy gloves such as the one in the picture. Sometimes it seems as if the smaller sooks’ claws are sharper and that they are nastier than the males.  Some men prefer to use a set of tongs when handling the merchandise. I usually just use a right-hand glove to handle the crab while using my left hand to measure the merchandise and also try to remind the crab who is the boss. In the depths of the summer, it is necessary to have a fly swatter or fly flap as they are called on Tangier Island. The slower pace of running the trotline allows the flies to congregate and some are bloodsuckers. These are the tools of the trade when I was crabbing with Wayne Wilson. The day isn’t over when we go back and put out the crabs to be delivered to the buyer. After discarding the used remnants of bait, the task ahead is to rebait the line, usually with razor clams in plastic mesh net bags, and sometimes with chicken necks. Crabs can be very picky eaters, which is strange when one understands the weird and dead stuff they eat. The crabber would do this in the evening before the next day. He would coil the line with the bait bags hanging from their snoods in a certain way into a large plastic trash can to keep them from tangling when setting the line. That baited line would go into a cooler overnight and be loaded on the truck in the morning and then down to the bulkhead to be loaded on to the boat. In the morning there were usually several watermen standing around leaning on one or another’s pickup trucks talking, joking, discussing what they had heard so and so had caught and where the day before. I would be taking pictures of such moments as that has been so much a part of the scene.  It was great fun to hear them ragging on each other, and about others who weren’t present, while passing news on to each other. Over the years they have gotten used to me and my camera. I have gifted many of them photos of them crabbing out on the river. Then we would leave and think about where to go. When out on the water after the line was laid out the skipper would run the line, and then raise the dipper. I would grab the dipper’s line, bring it in over the cull box, undo the clip that keeps the bag closed, shake out the crabs and whatever else had gone into the dipper. I would reseal the clip and send it back out for the skipper. Who would then lower it back into the water, placing the dipper’s lower edge just under the trotline. Having to keep the boat running along the line and not running over it has its own set of trials. It is a process of constantly making small tiller and throttle adjustments while keeping the boat in line with the trotline while fighting the tides, winds, and currents can be frustrating at time. This is especially so when there seem to be few crabs to catch. When asked what the ups are about the job, a trotliner will tell you it is the ups that are the worst part. They are baiting up, waking up, and taking up. At the end of the day when the waterman calls it quits he has to take up his line using a hydraulic winder. In the old days it was a job done by hand. Every day is different. It could be weather, tides and slack water, and winds. It could be when the crabs stop feeding after the first or morning bite, or when the afternoon bite starts or ends. All could be slightly different and sometimes so different that it would be like night and day. It is rare for one to go back to a place where a lot crabs have been caught for more than a couple of days to. Everybody watches each other and even at the buyers they will watch to see who caught, and how many, and hopefully find out where they were caught. Most would share that information, some wouldn’t. Some would be sure to be out the next morning before you leave the dock. You might very well find them where you had crabbed the day before. And that is a short description of crab potting and trotlining for crabs. Whew!