This Week on Chesapeake Summer...A Visit With a Chesapeake Bay Soft Crabber SMITH ISLAND, MD (wypr) - The Chesapeake Bay is the centerpiece of life in much of Maryland, and especially so in the summer. The early soft crab runs in Tangier Sound are among the first heralds of summer. Today we launch an occasional series, Chesapeake Summer. And in our first segment, WYPR's Joel McCord visits a Smith Island soft crabber.

A crab that has just shed its shell is vulnerable to everything, especially its cannibalistic hard-shelled brethren. And that's why Mark Kitching is checking the floats in his crab shanty well before dawn, looking to separate one from the other.

You have to do it three to four times a day as the crab sheds. In cooler weather you don't have to do it as often. When it's warm like it is now you have to do it more often cause the warmer the water the faster the crab will start to stiffen up.

To the untrained eye, the crabs all look pretty much the same. But Kitching, whose family goes back generations on the only inhabited offshore island in Maryland's part of the bay, can spot the subtle differences in coloring instantly. It's just that he has a hard time explaining that to outsiders.

I'm not very good at knowing why they look different to me; I just know that they do. I guess experience or what have you. 02:00

He moves the soft crabs to a walk-in cooler to keep them from stiffening up and begins packing others, then attaching shipping labels to the boxes. Those boxes go to the end of his pier to begin their journey to market. They'll be in New York by evening.

At last, he fires up the engine on his boat and heads for a nearby cove knowing his wife and daughter will tend to the shanty while he's crabbing. There is barely a hint of pink in the eastern sky when he drops the first crab scrape overboard.

He trails two of the wish-bone shaped contraptions with nets behind either side of his boat for 10 minutes or so, and then wrestles one onboard. The net is full of grass and teeming with life, grass shrimp, tiny eels and crabs of all sorts. Some are smaller than your fingernail; others are big enough to be dinner.

When you clear away you can notice some small shrimp at times. It's nothing big like a terrapin is. And that's normal. You might catch one a day, you might catch one every scrape some days. It's according to where you're working at.


This time, a terrapin does stick its head over the railing, straining to get back into the water. Kitching dumps it all on the washboard, tosses the scrape, and the terrapin, back into the water and sets to work quickly, culling the catch.

Peelers that are about to shed in the next day or two go in one basket, those that won't shed for another two weeks or so, in another and crabs that have just shed their shells go into a box he has attached to the stern.

He steers his boat in sweeping curves around the cove, pulling in first one scrape, then the other. Six hours later he'll return to the shanty to unload his catch. On this day, that's less than a bushel of peelers, about a third of what he averaged the week before.

Most of the crabs we were catching then have shedded off or gone through their cycle and we've caught most of them up and now we just keep working day by day and wait for them to turn up again.

Kitching, whose grandmother, Frances, lured visitors to this island for decades with her cooking, is one of the few scrapers left working the shallow coves and guts. It's kind of an iffy business, he explains, unlike hard crabbing where you sell your catch daily.

You have to put them in the floats, they have to shed, you have to ship them out and then most of the time you got a four to five day period before you get paid in some circumstances. Until then, you're not just really sure what you made. Till you get the check in hand.

But it's the only business he knows, he says, and he isn't looking for any other job.

I'm Joel McCord, reporting on Smith Island for 88.1, WYPR.
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