Long before sunrise, the river pulls Jack Torney from sleep. By 4:48 a.m., he’s following the familiar bridge lights up the Severn, motor chugging, bins piled with baited line.

Hour after hour, he retraces the same mile near the Naval Academy Bridge, hauling his lines past private piers where the crabs are thick. With a hoop net, he scoops up a few at a time. One by one, he measures and sorts them into baskets at his feet. It’s the slow and stubborn work of a dying breed of Chesapeake Bay watermen who’ve plied these waters for generations.

At 22, Torney is an unlikely heir to the old life on the bay. He’s not from a family of watermen. He lives in Annapolis, where workboats like his have all but disappeared amid the luxury sailboats and weekend cruisers. Yet he works the rivers alone and sells his catch for cash from the driveway.

“I like the independence,” he says with a grin, sweeping another tangle of crabs into the sorting bin he built by hand. “Just being on the water, doing my own thing.”

Once the backbone of little towns along the bay, crabbers and oystermen timed their lives to the tides, passing the trade from father to son. But the bay is less generous now, and the work no easier, leading more watermen each year to tie up for good.

Only a third as many commercial crabbers are active in Maryland as 30 years ago, down to about 2,200 today, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. Their average age is about 60.

Most crabbers use pots and hydraulic lifts — all the latest gear — nowadays. Some have 40-foot boats with professional crews to supply restaurants and large buyers. Torney, however, sticks to trotlines — long ropes strung with bait bags and weighted to the river bottom, the way Indigenous people first fished the bay. His only modern tool is a motorized trotline winder.

As sleek new condos and marinas carve into the last stretches of Maryland’s working shoreline, newcomers like Torney can find it hard to even get on the water. Licenses are limited and the season cut short by winter. Even old-timers say they’re squeezed by out-of-state competition, tighter margins and fewer of the Chesapeake’s once-abundant blue crabs.

Watermen live by a centuries-old code, notes longtime bay observer John Page Williams: Go out every day. Work fast. Work hard.

“That means going out when it’s raining, trying to judge, pushing your boat when it’s blowing, getting up at 3:30 when you don’t feel like it,” says Williams, who is 82 and retired after decades as a naturalist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “It’s a physical grind.”

‘I’ll bring home dinner’

It’s not a life most kids in Annapolis know anymore. At City Dock, where fishermen once unloaded their catch, tourists now wait for sightseeing cruises. The son of a county planner and a health care professional, Torney grew up in this world, playing lacrosse and swimming on the summer team behind Navy-Marine Corps Stadium. Most of his friends are in college.

It was his grandfather, a railroader, who taught him a slower rhythm — how to bait a line, wait for the tug and trust the water. Torney still remembers his glee when he was 3 and pulled in his first wriggling crab off the dock. He would tell his mom, “I’ll bring home dinner.”

And he did.

“When you go fishing, you don’t always bring home a fish,” says his mother, Susan Torney. “With crabbing, you always get something, you just don’t know how much.”

By middle school, Torney was saving for a small used boat. He ran a vegetable stand from the front yard and shoveled sidewalks. “Outdoorsy, more of a doer” is how his best friend, Max Makovitch, describes him. When the boys got boater licenses in seventh grade, as kids here do, Torney couldn’t wait to buy off-the-shelf crab traps, recalls Makovitch, a senior at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Torney’s occasional deckhand.

Torney didn’t lose interest. He tagged along with a commercial crabber up the street and saw real volume — crabs pulled in by the bushel. By 10th grade at Annapolis High School, when the pandemic had shut things down, he was out setting lines of his own. As a senior with a lighter schedule, he built “Jack’s Crabs,” shrugging off his waders as he rushed to lacrosse practice.

He willingly entered a world where independent crabbers scratch out a living. A dredge survey this winter found a crab population of roughly 238 million, the second-lowest level in 35 years. Last year’s harvest fell 28% below the annual average of 59 million pounds.

Scientists blame multiple pressures — invasive blue catfish, disappearing underwater grasses and the suburban sprawl encroaching on fragile marshland that once sheltered a wealth of crabs.

On Tilghman Island, fifth-generation waterman C.R. Wilson has weathered a lifetime of worrisome forecasts. The 52-year-old still hauls pots, despite three slipped discs. Fuel and repair costs keep climbing, and he frets about stricter limits on the hours he can crab.

His father once urged him to find “a nine-to-five job and a nice boat to enjoy on the weekends.” Wilson never did. He likes the beauty of the bay at sunrise and “being my own captain.”

“A lot of kids don’t want to work on the water; all they want is a computer job,” says Wilson. “Nothing wrong with that. You either got it in your blood or you don’t.”

That belief is being tested by a couple of first-generation crabbers. Best-known is 28-year-old TikTok crabber Luke McFadden, who has amassed 1.7 million followers with energetic videos from his Pasadena boat, winning over even skeptical locals.

Torney is unabashedly old-school. He sells from Facebook but mostly by word-of-mouth, direct to customers, cash only. Each evening, he stuffs mesh bags with oily razor clams and ties them along two 1,800-foot lines and a smaller one at 1,200-feet. He hasn’t bothered to name his 21-foot skiff, which he keeps at a no-frills dock in Whitehall Bay.

For now, he’s living at home. He works 15 hours a day, six days a week, eight months a year. Some days are good — eight or 10 bushels; others, not so much. Bushel prices are up and down; a good weekend can bring $380 a bushel. His mother worries about the toll — hours bent over the water, the sunburned neck and sore back — and hopes he’ll branch out to fishing charters.

A day on the water

On the 111th day of his fourth season, Torney has one hand loose on the wheel (and sometimes not at all) as he idles along in a steady drizzle between the Naval Academy and Severn River bridges. The winder whirs. Red-tipped female crabs surface as the line rises in the shallows, claws snagged on bait bags. The old excitement kicks in: “I do like to see ‘em pile up,” he says.

Most mornings are like this — quiet, repetitive, though not without surprises. A squall blows in, a line snags, or crabs vanish from once-plentiful spots in the Severn, South and Magothy rivers he knows so well.

As the season edges toward its Dec. 15 close, Torney is alone more, fewer boats or even paddlers about. Today, in the damp chill, only the harbor master greets him.

“There’s a peacefulness being out here alone,” Torney says.

Still, he’s glad to get a cheerful wave from George Turner on his runabout. At 75, the well-known Annapolis real-estate agent likes to crab most mornings, just as he did in high school. He keeps an eye out for Torney — “a real go-getter” — and shares an extra bushel or two.

“Crabbing keeps you young,” Turner says with a laugh.

Torney’s reputation draws customers from as far away as Owings Mills and Silver Spring. Some come for a $1-a-female crab deal, but many just to support him.

“He works extremely hard, he doesn’t go to a middle man and he’s very reasonable,” says M. Miles Yu, a history professor at the Naval Academy. “But mostly I appreciate the spirit of it.”

Outside his shed, Torney barely notices the swarm of flies around the bait buckets. Asked why he’s chosen such hard work, he shrugs, then smiles. “I just like it. I think it’s fun.”

He still has line left to coil. In a few hours, the river will call him back.

JoAnna Daemmrich is a freelance journalist based in Annapolis.