Before Sunup

The alarm goes off at 3:30 am. By a little after 4, Jeff Harrison is on his boat, making the half-hour run to a stretch of water he's spent fifty years learning. He lays out his trotline, works it in 20-minute passes, culling crabs between runs. Today was a good one: ten baskets, on his 13th straight day of work.

He is 68, a fifth-generation waterman from Tilghman Island, and here is how he describes that alarm clock: "It's kind of like Christmas morning. You can't wait to get up to see."

Most of us, sitting down to a tray of steamed blue crabs, are not thinking about the men and women who left the dock before sunrise to catch them. That is partly by design. Chesapeake watermen are a particular breed: hardworking, independent, and happy to go unseen.

Invisible, remarkably, in the county with more working watermen than anywhere else in Maryland. It suits them fine — except for one day each August.

Harrison started fishing with his grandfather at 9 — "I don't know if that was for babysitting purposes or what" — and followed his father onto the water, oystering with him in winters by 17. That's the order of it: you follow, you learn, you stay. The hours are grueling, the work breaks bodies, and the water promises nothing.

Watermen work through it into their 70s anyway. Ask Harrison why, and he doesn't reach for a reason. "In some way, I didn't have a choice," he says. "And I don't regret a minute of it."

Harrison says this on the heels of a winter that tested the sentiment. "Our oyster markets were awful. We had plenty of product — you could catch a limit — but you really couldn't sell them. I think last year I worked 45 days. That was from the first of November to the end of March."

It wasn't his worst stretch. That came in the early 2000s, the worst oyster season he'd ever seen, arriving the same season he learned a third child was on the way. He put his captain's license to work on the Choptank River bridge project for two years. "Even though I was on the water, running a boat," he says, "I really did want to get back."

He got back. These days, he's established enough to ride out a bad winter. "But some of these guys can't. When you're young and you have a family, with kids and a house payment, a boat payment, a truck payment…" He doesn't finish the math. Come spring, he counted boats instead: "I see most of them are still here crabbing. So hopefully it'll turn around."

In 2009, the watermen organized. They set aside the competition that runs between them every working morning. The Talbot Watermen Association gave them a footing and a voice in their own future — and quickly, they started talking about an event.

Joe Spurry, who helped found the association and has been part of it from the start, puts it plainly: "We wanted to bring our voices as watermen to the public, so they could see and talk to us."

CBMM proved an eager partner. It had run a crab festival of its own for years and watched it fade. "The idea here was, rather than focusing on the commodity, let's focus on the people," says Pete Lesher, CBMM's Chief Historian. "It was the watermen who were saying, this is what's important to us. This is how we want to be seen."

The two came together as Watermen's Appreciation Day. Lesher describes CBMM's role in a phrase that fits the day: "How can we get out of the way?"

The first Watermen's Appreciation Day was held on Aug. 15, 2010. It caught on immediately. Though it took the man parking cars to figure out why. In the early years, Harrison — not yet president — took the volunteer job nobody wanted and asked every arriving driver the same question: Here for the crab feast? About 9 out of 10 said no. The boat docking. The watermen thought they'd built a crab feast with a show attached. The parking attendant learned it was the other way around. He's been the association's president since 2017.

The docking contest wasn't invented for tourists. Eastern Shore watermen have been racing to the dock for more than half a century, longer than most of today's competitors have been alive. What began as "try not to hit a pole" has evolved into purpose-built boats that almost plane off in reverse, roaring across an active channel and dropping lines over three pilings in well under half a minute.

Here's the thing: Most of us assume this event exists to celebrate the watermen — and that's not wrong. But the watermen see it differently. To them, this is the day to appreciate the community. And they do it their way, steaming and serving the catch themselves, hand to hand, at $25 a dozen this year, down from $40. "We want people to eat these crabs," Harrison says, "and see just how good they are."

Nick Hargrove would like a word about the word "heritage." "I don't really like using it," he says. "It sounds like something that was here and gone."

Hargrove, who turns 40 this fall, runs Tilghman Island Seafood, the largest blue catfish processing operation in Maryland. He is a first-generation waterman, first hooked as a kid watching his best friend dive for oysters in the dead of winter, while the boy's dad ran the boat. Today he employs dozens, buys from some 70 watermen, and holds the door for the next wave: A blue catfish license costs $10, against $15,000 for a traditional tidal fish license. "You can have a little skiff and run up these creeks and make a good living," he says. "I see a lot of younger guys getting into it."

The doors don't always lead to water. High school kids bait trotlines at night — six or eight watermen's worth at $50 a line — making real money for work watermen used to do themselves after dark. Others turn up in the boat shops and mechanic shops that keep the fleet running. Nobody involved calls any of it heritage.

Hargrove doesn't sugarcoat the life: the 3 a.m. alarms, the holidays lost, an industry that "will just break you" if you're in it for the wrong reasons. His test is one Harrison would recognize: "If you like it, you'll be good at it. You'll think about it at night. You'll think about it when you wake up." Fifty years apart in their starting points, the two men describe the same alarm clock.