Tilghman’s Island
I am back on Tilghman’s Island (some call it Tilghman Island; it’s kind of confusing as the town is Tilghman, MD but most of the older watermen call it Tilghman’s). I set up my lights and background and Willie Roe came by with his collection of items that he dredged up during his clamming days on Chesapeake Bay.
He has a huge assortment of 19th century clay pipes.
I especially like this one with Etoile etched into it and the lovely little star above the word.
Many of the pipes had the words HOME RULE stamped upon the bowl. Here is what I found when I looked it up on the internet. So amazing what you can learn about the past.
I-95
I was meant to be driving to DC as I am writing this, but due to the winter storm nailing the I-95 corridor, I ended up leaving last night. I stopped just North of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, got a room for a few hours and was on the road again by 6.30 this morning. It started snowing just after I parked in Peter’s apartment building in DC, and now at 2.15 it is really coming down. And cold to boot. I really wanted to make it here today as it is his 25th birthday. We’ll get to spend the whole day together and then go out to dinner somewhere in the neighborhood this evening.
Tomorrow I am off to Tilghman to shoot Chesapeake Bay related artifacts for the Watermen’s Museum. Originally Peter Carroll was going to be shooting video as well, but he basically had no safe way of getting here from Ithaca due to the weather. He and I have been working on the island on and off for over 5 years now and it is such an interesting place. / The second of his films about the watermen and their families will be shown on Maryland Public Television Tuesday, 23rd April at 8.30 PM. Here is a teaser. And here is a link to an earlier post of mine about one aspect of the project.
Pound Netting on the Chesapeake
This is going to be a fairly picture heavy post. On a technical note, all of the pre dawn images, and most of the early morning ones were shot at an amazingly high ISO of 12,800. No flash, just the boat’s work lights.
Peter and I got to the dock at 4.00 AM to meet Robby Wilson who runs a pound net operation not far from Tilghman’s Island in the Chesapeake Bay.
We were on a scow that had been converted from an old houseboat, and his 2 crew were on a smaller skiff. We motored out of Tilghman for about 40 minutes and got to the first of 4 of his nets before 5.00 AM.
The two guys in the skiff had arrived some minutes before us, and were already hauling up the “pound”.
I asked several people where the term pound net comes from and there seems to be no consensus. It might come from the early American idea of a collection point for animals. The FAO has a pretty good description here.
The two boats work together to roll up the pound and then scoop the fish into the scow with the help of a winch.
The primary species Robby is fishing for is alewife. Many different fishes are caught in the nets, so the crew’s job is to cull most of the others, of which rockfish (striped bass) are the commonest. Some catfish and flounder are kept to sell as food fish. The alewife are sold mainly as bait for crabbers. After the first of June, the season for rockfish opens, and he is allowed to sell those.
It is wet, strenuous, and demanding work. It was unusually calm and clear yesterday, but the boat was still rocking, and water and fish scales were flying everywhere. After the cull, the crew would hop in the skiff and motor to the next set of nets.
The culling goes on until the pound is empty and then the crew moves on to the next location.
The process is repeated for each of the four sites. Travel time between them us usually less than a half hour.
Below is a good shot of system. Robby and the crew usually are out putting the stakes into the bottom around the first of March. They fell the trees and sharpen them in the off season. The depth of the water is anywhere between 7 and 15 feet.
Robby’s dad Clifford “Big Daddy” Wilson came out to help out. He is also a waterman; a few years ago Peter and I went out on his crab boat.
On the way back to the dock, the fish are shoveled into plastic baskets so they can be off-loaded into one of Robby’s trucks to be taken to Cambridge, MD to be sold.
They were nice enough to stop for a minute for a photo, but other wise they are constantly in motion.
The boats were back at the dock around 8.00 AM.
It’s about an hour to unload into the truck, and then the scow is cleaned up and made ready for the next day. It is pretty much a seven day a week job as the nets fill up pretty fast.
An amazing day. We are very fortunate to hang around with these guys and document their work. They couldn’t have been nicer or more accommodating.
Crabbing on the Chesapeake
Yesterday we were out on a crab boat with Roy and Colleen Sadler. We were on the dock by 4.30 AM, and on the Bay putting out lines by 5.oo. It is still early in the season, and when Roy started pulling up the lines, there wasn’t much action.
The sun was just coming up over the horizon, so the boat was still using the onboard lights. The technique is to attach small packets of razor clams to a line about every 10 or 15 feet. Roy and Colleen would drop the line, circle around and hope the crabs would chow down. The line would be strung over a roller, and any attached crabs would drop into the net Roy is holding above.
The crabs have to be over a certain size to be kept (I think it’s between 4 and 5 inches), or they get tossed back into the bay. Since the sun hadn’t come up, they were mostly inactive. But as the sun rose higher, more and more took the bait.
You can see the little orange packets of razor clams coming up over the roller.
Bait.
Roy and Colleen are amazing people. Roy has been working on the water his whole life, and Colleen works in a bank on the island during the week. She is usually on the boat at weekends helping out. The economics of making a living off the bay have changed so much over the years; Roy has said it would be very difficult to keep his business going without her income. A lot of what we are learning on this leg of the project has to do with the stifling regulations that the State of Maryland is forcing on the watermen (and women), and the ongoing change to the bay’s ecosystem which makes harvesting seafood such a challenge.
Jon Crispin's Notebook 
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