A few days after discovering his forever crab boat ripped apart — electronics stolen, gauges and screens and windows bashed, hydraulic lines severed — fisherman Luke McFadden was running his crab stand Sunday in Glen Burnie, where he spends every weekend with his family selling his catch from a gravel lot.

Shocked, stung and devastated, McFadden, aka the TikTok waterman, still had a business to run and employees to pay, so he was glad to see the line of customers trailing out of the lot to the strip mall next door.

Many had heard about the vandalism of his boat, Desperado, via the social media platform, the same way his 1.7 million followers learn about the workaday exploits of this young, telegenic Chesapeake Bay crabber who works out of Bodkin Creek near his hometown of Pasadena. They responded with an outpouring of support.

“I just want to say I respect what you do,” one customer offered Sunday. “I’m so sorry to hear about your boat. I was watching [your video] this morning, and I was like, what piece of work would do this? Sorry this happened to you. I sent you a message this morning, I just said keep your head up. My wife watches you guys too.”

The damage was extensive, the motives inexplicable but felt personal to McFadden.

“It’s been really awesome to see the community actually show up and really have my back,” said McFadden, 28, who started fishing at 18. For now he’ll keep using Southern Girl, his circa 1969 houseboat converted into a crab boat that he has had for years.

With charm and a bit of self-deprecating humor, McFadden has taken his audience through countless boat repairs and projects, including the transformation of a sunken wreck, a wooden fishing boat called the Dora Lynn, into what is now his crab stand. He has recorded tutorials on how to steam and pick crabs and hold them without getting pinched, and given occasional glimpses into his personal life. His wife, Lindsey, works at the crab stand on East Furnace Branch Road with him and his parents.

He once took viewers on a tour of a historic house on Smith Island, and he was among the first to record video of the Key Bridge wreckage. He also chronicled the search for his dream boat, a 42-foot Chesapeake dead rise workboat built by the now defunct Hulls Unlimited East in Deltaville, Virginia.

He lost out on a boat before finding Desperado in Kent Narrows. He became its legal owner July 24. That night, he, Lindsey and a friend celebrated over dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant, Primo Pasta Kitchen.

Desperado is bigger, more powerful and faster than Southern Girl. With it, McFadden would be able to work in rough weather, take on more crew, carry more equipment and generally be more productive.

“And it was just sexy as hell,” he said.

He drove to Kent Narrows the next morning to pilot Desperado back to Pasadena. He took a friend to drive the truck back across the bay.

“I was really looking forward to getting her home and really excited to run it by myself,” McFadden said.

“It was a malicious act,” he said. “This wasn’t some crackheads trying to make a couple bucks. They were trying to render the boat useless. Whoever did it, they knew how to tear up a boat.”

The Queen Anne’s County Office of the Sheriff and the Maryland Natural Resources Police are investigating the incident. McFadden said surveillance footage captured some of the events of that night.

“I would suspect, highly suspect, it has something to do with my social media presence,” said McFadden, who also has 590,000 subscribers on YouTube, “because I know there are people in that area that do not like me purely based on that.”

McFadden was a struggling waterman four years ago trying to gain leverage in his industry. The big crab operations bought space on billboards along the highway and ran radio commercials, but he noticed everyone looking at their phones.

He once hired a couple of high school kids to help on his boat, and neither of them knew of Tom Cruise or Steve Irwin, but “they could list every TikToker they could think of,” McFadden said.

“I was trying to build a clientele,” he said. “I had no money. I didn’t have anything really. I was just another guy crabbing and selling at the market, and there was no way to set yourself apart really.”

He never anticipated the recognition and notoriety he has gained.

He purchased the empty commercial lot in Glen Burnie about the time he got the idea to take his business onto TikTok. He couldn’t afford to have a market built, hence turning the old boat into a crab stand. Rather than selling to wholesalers, McFadden sells directly to consumers.

The repairs to the Desperado (which he is considering renaming) will likely come to at least $30,000, but he had plans to rebuild much of it anyway. His insurance covers only liability and not damage to his boat. Insuring a crab boat is prohibitively expensive, if he can even find an insurer willing to cover him, he said.

As he and his family prepared to close up the stand Sunday, he spoke pragmatically about the setback, thinking of a friend and fellow fisherman who had recently become blinded in an accident and will never work the bay again.

“Worse things can happen,” McFadden said. “At the end of the day, my problem is a solvable problem and nobody got hurt. You know what I mean?”

Anyone with information about the vandalism to McFadden’s boat should call Maryland Natural Resources Police at 410-260-8888.