An 18-wheeler rumbles off the highway near the old Bethlehem Steel plant and turns down the railroad tracks toward a loading dock. It’s nine minutes late.

A fleet of delivery vans and box trucks from Maryland crab houses and wholesalers awaits. In this hustle, every minute counts.

The refrigerated tractor-trailer backs in; its door rolls up. Stacked inside are boxes and boxes of blue crabs. It’s staggering to see an 18-wheeler packed full of live crabs.

When Brad McCarthy came to Baltimore in the late 2000s to run a seafood carryout, he wasn’t prepared for the sight.

“I remember pulling up there and going, holy f——,” McCarthy said. “I don’t know if anybody can really grasp what 800 boxes, like 40,000 pounds of crabs, looks like coming off the back ...

“You’re talking anywhere from $160,000 to $250,000 on one truck.”

On this day in June, three more trucks are scheduled to arrive, making just another Tuesday.

Here was a rare glimpse into the modern crab business. There wasn’t a workboat or shoreline in sight, but just a trucking warehouse off the Baltimore Beltway with pallets of iced crabs.

It’s an open secret that Maryland’s famous steamed crabs often don’t come from Maryland. Indeed, some 1,100 miles separate the Baltimore area from the richest fishing grounds for blue crabs.

That would be Louisiana, and today the Bayou State supplies more blue crabs than anyplace else. Louisiana has eclipsed Maryland’s reported catch for 13 consecutive years.

Within a generation, the Maryland crab business shifted from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay to the interstate. And those who make their living in it are adapting to survive. A third-generation Eastern Shore waterman left his workboat to drive a delivery truck. The restaurants and carryouts now stay open year round.

Crabs for Christmas, why not?

Marylanders are even running crab docks in Louisiana, to the alarm of seafood dealers there, who worry about outsiders pushing in. It’s a race for shares of a lucrative market. There are winners, and there are losers.

In the lower Chesapeake Bay, a historic community of watermen is holding onto the little market they have left.

This is how far Maryland has come to carry on its seafood heritage. Florida has oranges, Maine has lobsters and Maryland has crabs, though not as many anymore. No matter, the industry has evolved to make do. A closely guarded supply chain whisks millions of live crabs up from the bayou year round to sustain our proud identity.

The journey begins in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, where the highway dead ends at a sign for the “End of the World.”

Down on the bayou

St. Bernard Parish curves east from New Orleans into the gulf like a catfish hook.

In square miles and population, the parish compares to a rural county on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The historic Yscloskey Bridge, from which clergy bless the shrimp boats, leads to the outpost of Hopedale.

Visitors in the dark are warned — teased, maybe — to watch the road for alligators. The fishing camps rise on stilts above the swamp. There’s an hour until sunrise when a pickup truck comes down the road towing ice chests and bait fish. Out step Capt. Bobby Lovell and two deckhands.

Stocky and 49 years old, Lovell is the picture of a Louisiana fishing boat captain. Beard, baseball cap, blue jeans. His father turned to commercial fishing when the aluminum plant closed. Bobby Lovell practically grew up on the bayou. With the swamp as a playground, his dad would catch him a baby alligator for Easter.

The freshwater Mississippi spills into the saltwater gulf through a bewildering maze of bayous, canals and shallow lakes. Lovell insists there’s no better fishing ground in the world for blue crabs. The annual catch numbers support him. Since 2020, Louisiana fishermen report catching an average of 45 million pounds per year. That outpaces Maryland’s average of 25 million pounds per year as the historical Chesapeake catch declines.

Today, Lovell will sell his every crab to Baltimore.

First, the captain pulls out his cellphone to go live on Facebook.

“Good mawnin’. Good mawnin’. Good mawnin’,” he says to 159,000 followers.

With the runaway hit of Maryland’s TikTok crabber, fishermen are building brands as folksy influencers. The internet knows Lovell as “WhiteBoot Warriors,” after a fisherman’s classic rubber footwear. He posts about his adventures in crabbing, lifting the curtain, however slightly, on the Maryland supply chain.

Before sunrise, the bayou is calm and silent. Lovell is fishing the inner marshes today, where the swamp is thickest. He slows his 26-foot fishing boat, the “Never Satisfied,” beside a floating orange cork.

“First trap of the day!” the captain calls.

Baltimore labels the biggest crabs “colossals,” “whales” or “jumbos.” These top-grade No. 1s can weigh 1.3 pounds and fetch prices almost like lobsters. On this day, a dozen jumbos sell for $175 at retail across Maryland. Lovell would rather catch fewer big crabs than many small ones. This costs him less ice, fuel and packaging. Expenses go down; prices go up.

The first trap rises. Three huge, dark crabs.

“That’s what Maryland likes! Don’t get no better’n that. Know what that’s worth in Maryland? Big, dirty bottom? That’s a 7-inch-plus male,” says the captain, ever the showman.

The rusty bottoms are a telltale sign of heavy crabs. A white belly, by contrast, signals a light crab that shed recently. White bellies are worth little and tossed back. They are also called “kites,” so light they might blow away.

The captain grades crabs bigger than 6 1/4 inches as No. 1s. These crabs are in such demand today that one of Lovell’s top buyers, a wholesaler on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, texts him “wide open.” This means the wholesaler wants as many No. 1 crabs as Lovell can catch. In commercial fishing, this is a fleeting and precious thing: unlimited market.

“People down here, they get upset because we’re sending all of our No. 1s to Maryland. They can’t get no No. 1s,” Lovell says. “At the same time, they’re not willing to pay Maryland prices.”

These market pressures create surprising contradictions. Although Louisiana’s fishing grounds are plentiful with crabs, it can be hard to buy a bushel of No. 1s around here. The trinity of Louisiana seafood is crawfish, shrimp and oysters.

“Crabs never used to be big money,” Lovell says. “Before we started to ship to Baltimore, we only had local markets. We didn’t get any money for crabs. Ain’t nobody wanted to be a crab fisherman.”

Then came the 18-wheelers that changed everything. Refrigerated tractor-trailers known as “reefers” began to haul live crabs up from the Gulf, connecting the richest fishing ground to the richest market. Chesapeake crab catches were dwindling while Maryland menu prices were exploding. To Louisiana fishermen, the Baltimore market had never been so accessible or so lucrative.

Chalin Delaune, of Louisiana’s seafood marketing board, says the state’s crab fishery would collapse without Maryland’s money.

“Louisiana couldn’t sustain that kind of price. Call it spoiled, I suppose. But these crabs are in our backyard. We’re not going to pay that kind of money for them,” he said.

Aboard the Never Satisfied are father and son deckhands. Eric Gervais, the dumper, shakes the trap to empty the crabs. He replaces the bait fish with a fresh pogie and tosses the trap over. Louisiana’s famous brown pelicans, big as dinosaurs, glide down to gulp the old bait.

Jimmy Gervais, the sorter, throws overboard the kites and smalls. Louisiana fishermen devised a method to prepare their crabs for a long road ahead. He sloshes the crabs through a bath of ice water. Stunned, the crabs become dormant. Then he packs them in 70-pound plastic crates.

The work is fast and repetitive. The whir of the puller, the rattle of the trap, the slosh of the ice bath. The captain motors to the next trap. Hours pass by.

In the crab business, the money can come fast or not at all. Rainy days in Baltimore can slacken demand and depress prices at the docks in Louisiana. Lovell earns anything from $1.75 to $5.50 per pound.

When prices are high, he fishes for weeks straight. The work is exhausting, on the water by 6 a.m. and off by 3 p.m., December to October. In 2022, his best year, he caught 333,000 pounds of crabs. That’s more than 7,000 bushels. He does well enough to take off for three months in the winter and travel to his modest, out-of-state hunting camps.

“We are very grateful for the never-ending hunger for crab in Baltimore,” he says. “They support a lot of Louisiana families.”

By 3:15 p.m., they’re late. The captain guns it back to the dock, where they load his pickup and trailer with the day’s catch: 540 pounds of crabs, about a dozen bushels bound for Baltimore.

He tows the crabs up the road to his refrigerated sorting shed. The thermostat’s set to 66 degrees. The crabs are chilled to survive 16 hours on the road.

The men are hurrying now. They plunge the crabs into more ice water and dump them across a table. The crabs are sorted by size and packed into 45-pound shipping boxes of waxed cardboard. Some crabs are bound for the wholesaler on Kent Island, others a seafood market in Carroll County. A box of No. 1s sells for more than $400 at retail across Maryland now.

On the water and online, Lovell’s an open book. He offers up that he quit drinking as a teenager. He razzes his wife by speakerphone. Yet he declines to say much about the next leg of the journey for his crabs. He doesn’t want to betray confidences.

It’s 5:37 p.m. when a voice calls into the sorting shed.

“Truck’s here.”

The long haul

Shevis “Che Che” Collins, of Liberty, Mississippi, started hauling blue crabs in the early 2000s and discovered this was no sleepy delivery job. Not at all. When he pulled into Baltimore with an 18-wheeler full of crabs, buyers would rush for the boxes. Was this really just about seafood?

“I can’t believe the amount of money; I can’t believe the amount of crabs,” Collins said. “I even started to check the boxes.”

He found no drugs in them. Rather, the urgency was a product of this crazy idea to deliver a live crab across a thousand miles to reach a dinner table. Shrimp, fish and soft crabs can be frozen then shipped, but hard crabs must be steamed alive to make sure they’re fresh and safe to eat.

The crab truckers followed a careful schedule. They would load the tractor-trailers late in the day after the Louisiana fishermen came off the water with the catch. Then Collins and a partner would drive all night to try to reach Baltimore by the following afternoon. The route required 16.5 hours, but federal law limits them to 11-hour shifts behind the wheel. So they went in pairs: One drove, one slept.

“You keep your door closed,” Collins said. “You do your stopping on the way home.”

The job demanded long stretches away from home, but also brought Collins a sense of pride. Baltimore’s famous crab houses depended on him. By hauling crabs, Collins said, he put three kids through college and paid off his house at age 40.

Collins went on to drive for White Marsh Transport for a decade. The company had emerged as the dominant player in the business of hauling crabs by the late 2000s. That’s when Brad McCarthy came to Baltimore to run his family’s crab house in Dundalk.

One day, McCarthy went to meet the tractor-trailers at White Marsh’s distribution center, “the crab dock.”

“That’s when I got the shock and awe,” McCarthy said. “Like 40 to 50 trucks meeting at this location to get crabs off an 18-wheeler. … You’re just watching every single truck picking up 20, 50 or 100 boxes.”

Today, Holly Marcin serves as White Marsh’s vice president of operations. She also owns Blue Crab House in northern Harford County. In an email, she offered to meet and talk about her family’s trucking business. The company has been hauling crabs from Louisiana for about 21 years, she wrote.

“Many within the sequence are reluctant to divulge trade secrets, or allow viewers into how they do things slightly different than others, specifically in Louisiana,” she wrote.

Marcin did not respond to attempts to schedule the meeting. When a reporter visited the White Marsh crab dock in Sparrows Point, he was asked to leave.

“There’s a lot of money involved,” Collins said. “They don’t want anybody to know.”

The sheer scale of the operation comes into focus by the White Marsh Transport “crab hotline,” a daily recorded phone message to announce the arrival times of the crab trucks. Tuesdays routinely bring four tractor-trailers. A week may bring as many as 12 trucks. The month of May alone brought at least 45 truckloads of crabs.

In federal transportation records, White Marsh reports having 41 trucks and 36 drivers to haul crabs as well as some metal sheets or coils and refrigerated food and beverages.

In a follow-up email, Marcin rejected the notion that her company was secretive. She offered another explanation for their discretion.

“Who our customers are and who they sell to or purchase from is their information and we owe it to our customers to not share that information,” she wrote.

For years, the White Marsh trucks were the only way most Louisiana seafood brokers could reach the richest market. And the only way most Baltimore wholesalers could get the biggest crabs.

Chris Pomes, who runs Pomes Seafood on a slice of marshland that divides Lake Pontchartrain from Lake St. Catherine in New Orleans, said White Marsh and its top wholesalers held sway over the entire industry.

Frustrated, he started running his own trucks in 2017, and Collins drives for him now. Pomes runs crab trucks three days a week to the seafood market in Jessup, lately delivering more than 8,000 bushels of live crabs weekly.

In speaking to brokers and wholesalers, a picture emerges of the modern crab business as a loose consortium of mom-and-pop shops, each with their loyalties and grievances. Many are rooted in a family tradition. They are proud and fiercely competitive.

It’s quietly accepted across this industry that Louisiana crabs are often advertised as Maryland crabs. Some restaurants and carryouts market a Chesapeake Bay tradition online only to confirm by phone or tableside that the crabs on the menu that day came from Louisiana.

KiKi Shaw has tried blue crabs in Georgia and Florida and has concluded that neither matches a sweet and plump jimmy plucked from the cold Chesapeake Bay. So she left home in Howard County and crossed the Bay Bridge to celebrate her birthday in April at one of the Eastern Shore’s famous crab houses.

There was brown paper on the table with a bucket for shells. There was Shaw with her daughter, sister, niece and best friend, all of them cracking, pounding, picking and laughing through 18 large crabs.

“I consider myself a seafood connoisseur,” Shaw said. “Nothing compares to Maryland crabs.”

Only the betting odds are that her large, springtime crabs didn’t come from the Chesapeake Bay.

Later, Shaw was not surprised by this or bothered. She still had a sunny afternoon with friends, picking crabs on the water. One could just picture an old workboat chugging up to unload bushel baskets with her lunch.

Maryland’s crab business runs on this comforting mythology.

On Kent Island, Kevin Franklin Austin is a third-generation Maryland waterman who learned as a boy to sort crabs and cull oysters. When a friend introduced him to Louisiana crabs, he was stunned by the size and consistency. Soon, all of his customers wanted them.

Austin didn’t return to his boat for crabbing season in about 20 years.

He runs the wholesale business K&L Crabs with his wife. Their drivers meet the tractor-trailers to pick up Louisiana crabs, then deliver them to dozens of carryouts and restaurants, including classic crab houses on the Eastern Shore.

“Every year I thought about getting back out on the boat,” he said. “I’ve driven these damn trucks all over.”

He’s sat through gridlock and logged 14-hour days behind the wheel. The wholesale business has taken him as far as Western Maryland and central Pennsylvania. Still, his best day on the water brought about two dozen bushels while he’s sold as many as 500 bushels on the road.

Austin sells mostly Louisiana crabs today, including No. 1s from Lovell in St. Bernard Parish. Lately, he said, Maryland crabs have been underwhelming by comparison.

“I had one guy call me eight times today, trying to sell me some local crabs,” Austin said. “I’d normally buy his crabs, but the market’s not as great as it used to be, and these Louisiana crabs are as good as they’ve ever been.

“You can buy Louisiana No. 2s that make the local ones look like trash.”

When the crab business shifted south, other Maryland wholesalers felt pressure to follow or be left behind.

Jason Ruth runs the Harris Seafood Company in Grasonville on the Eastern Shore. In the beginning, he said, the crab houses turned to Louisiana only during Maryland’s offseason. Not anymore.

“They got customers demanding these big gulf crabs all the time,” he said. “They’re forced to buy Louisiana crabs all the time because they can’t get that here in Maryland. Or they can’t get it on a consistent basis.”

In search of bigger crabs himself, Ruth took over a dock in Bayou Lafourche southwest of New Orleans. There, he buys crabs from about two dozen fishermen and ships them north on the 18-wheelers at $24 per box.

He also stopped sending his truck down the shore to buy crabs from a historic center of the Maryland seafood industry, a place called Deal Island.

Their last bushels

These are hard times on Deal Island. Though life here was never a breeze.

The little Maryland island’s more of a peninsula that juts into the lower bay 20 miles south of Salisbury. Legend has it that this mosquito-ridden marshland was once a pirate hideout known as “Devil’s Island” with a neighboring village of “Damned Quarters.”

One low road cuts in through the Monie Bay estuary and past scrub pines and wild carrot. There’s a historical marker for the African-American beach resort that’s gone. There’s Lucky’s Last Chance General Store that’s closed. The road bends past overgrown clapboard houses and stacks of old crab pots down to the water’s edge. The streets are empty; the cemeteries are crowded. As in Louisiana, stone caskets rest atop the flood-prone ground.

There’s no grocery store or restaurant on the island. No gas station, either. When a visitor to Deal Island Elementary School was almost on empty, a teacher ran home for a gas can to fill him up. Isolated, the islanders have always depended on each other, and on the water.

Deal Island is a historic center of Maryland’s seafood industry. With 75 to 100 or so watermen, the island was homeport of the bay’s storied skipjacks, the last U.S. workboats under sail. The fleet disappeared with the oysters, but the island produced heroes such as Art Daniels, “the captain of the bay,” who oystered into his 90s.

Islanders have warned of economic collapse here for decades. In the last 20 years, the peninsula has lost one-third of its population. The ranks of working watermen have dwindled to about three dozen, those left say.

These are the men left behind as the crab business shifts from the bay to the interstate. To be sure, they face the same difficulties as fishermen everywhere: rising costs for fuel and supplies, too few mates, inconsistent crab runs. But here, the incoming tide of Louisiana crabs is felt acutely. To understand, consider the habits of bay crabs.

Chesapeake crabs bury in the mud of the lower bay to ride out the cold winter. When the weather warms, the crabs dig out and begin to migrate north. Virginia watermen traditionally have the first run of the crab season in mid-March. April brings the first runs for Maryland’s Crisfield and Deal Island.

Generations of Deal Island watermen had the springtime crab market almost all to themselves. No matter that their crabs tend to be smaller in the salty lower bay. Some men remember raking in $20,000 on a first run. Now, big Louisiana crabs flood the market and occupy the wholesalers.

“Before we’re allowed to set pots and harvest any crabs, they [Louisiana] got their crabs on the market,” Jacob Stuve said. “Once they’re on the market, they don’t want to give us nothing.”

At 32 years old, he’s among only a few young watermen on the island. The future looks bleak.

“The jimmies here, they’re packed full with rusty bottoms or nice marble bellies,” he said. “But you can’t sell them when you got bigger crabs on the market. A lot of people eat with their eyes.”

Though Harris Seafood Co. pulled out, other buyers remain. The watermen sell to Fat Boys Crabs in Salisbury for one. Another lifeline has been the trucking company Tidewater Express in Crisfield, which hauls their soft crabs to the fish markets of New York. They depend more than ever on peelers.

With fewer buyers, however, prices hover around $100 a bushel for their No. 1s, less than half the price a fisherman gets in Louisiana. Butch Walters has suggested they take cues from Alaska’s king crab fishery and seek government help to fix prices and set quotas. There are other ideas, if only said jokingly.

“So what? We cut their tires?” Stuve said.

Mostly, there’s resignation around the working marina on Scotts Cove. The house of one longtime waterman is in foreclosure. And a famous name just walked away from the water.

Terry Daniels III is the great-grandson of the “the captain of the bay” who oystered into his 90s. Terry Daniels went to Wor‑Wic Community College in Salisbury to become a history teacher only to learn something else.

“I couldn’t get the water out of my veins,” he said.

In his mid-20s, he bought a 38-foot fishing boat and named her the Ginny Bea, after his two grandmothers. Soon, he was oystering in winter and crabbing in summer, like four generations of Daniels men before him.

During crab season, he was up at 3:30 a.m. to tend to his peelers, buy bait and get on the water by dawn. Afternoons, he would drive his crabs around a fractured market. He did not fault the buyers who left for Louisiana crabs.

“I can only get you crabs April to November; they can get you crabs all year round,” he said. “You’re going to want to lock that in.”

Daniels sold to the trucks for Harris and New York, also to The Red Roost crab house and Delaware’s Harbor House Seafood — anywhere he could sell. His father assured him that the market would improve. His fiancée promised that she would support his any decision.

“The whole time I was planning the wedding, I’m feeling like I need to make a move,” he said. “I’m starting a family. I can’t keep hoping to make money.”

One recent afternoon, the Ginny Bea sits on blocks at the marina. Terry Daniels is home with his wife, Megan, and their newborn son, Clayton. Above the dining table hangs a huge photo of Daniels at work, crabbing. The scripture on their wall reads “As for me and my house, we shall serve crabs.”

It’s a perfect waterman’s home, though he’s no longer a working waterman.

Daniels took a job as a correctional officer last fall, and he works at a jail 45 minutes away. For the first time in his life he has health benefits, paid vacation and a steady income. He has time for baseball games and horse races and fishing trips just for fun. He misses the water, but shares no hard feelings about a crab business that’s leaving Deal Island behind.

“They just don’t see our crabs as valuable anymore,” he said.

Daniels wanted to celebrate his graduation from the officer training academy by inviting friends over in Eastern Shore style. So he found himself in the unfamiliar position of having to buy crabs.

It was late April, and there were big Louisiana crabs for sale. A bushel of larges went for $485.

He settled for hotdogs and hamburgers.