My Maryland

—Danny Alvarez

This is heralded as a comeback year for the species callinectes sapidus.

It's too early to tell if the 2010 harvest for Chesapeake blue crabs will confirm winter dredging surveys indicating—thanks to regulation based on good science—that there are now more crabs in the bay than at any other time in the last 10 years.

Too soon to know if men like my father will see a return to the cool morning catches of three to four bushels some 30 years ago that dwindled to hot afternoons of working for nothing more than bait barely nibbled.

And nothing—not even the Orioles winning two games in a row—would be a greater sign that the end of the world is not imminent than the return of crabs in great numbers to the Land of Pleasant Living.

Yet in good years and bad—whether the crabs are running or not—my brother, Danny, goes out on the Susan Renee to catch some keepers and rekindle memories of a childhood spent crabbing with our father.

(I remember when my father and uncles drove poles into waist-deep water off of Assateague Island, ran a line between the poles, and hung chicken necks from the line. Once I went crabbing with the old man on a boat. I took Don Quixote with me and never went again.)

My father's best friend from the tugboats was a mate named Jerome "Romey" Lukowski (1927-1997), and from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, they went crabbing on the Wye River every chance they got.

When Danny, now 50, turned 8 or 9, he was old enough to go out on the flat-bottomed wooden boat—held together with Red Hand epoxy—and learn how men talked when women weren't around.

"By the time I started waking up, we'd be launched and moving slowly through the water to their special spot," says Danny. "The sun was coming up, and fish were jumping. I was hooked.

"Around 6:30, they'd start laying out their lines...a couple of 600-feet trot lines baited with chicken necks. It took about a half-hour to get the lines out, and then they'd turn the motor off and have a sandwich and a cup of coffee for breakfast. They had a case of beer for later."

The key skill and main thrill in trotline crabbing is "dipping"—reaching below the water as a crab is gently pulled to the surface with a chicken neck in his claws and scooping it in with a net before it gets away.

This is not a job for the average kid, and Danny didn't get to dip until Romey and "the Chief" had filled a couple of bushels with crabs that often stretched nine inches from point to point.

To miss a crab was a humiliation that could haunt a kid deep into middle age.

Not long ago, Romey's son Gregory, who grew up to be a bay pilot, bumped into a mutual friend of the Alvarez family. Gregory's parting words to the man were: "When you see Danny, tell him he missed three crabs..."

Whether Danny missed three crabs or not isn't the point.

"On the way back to the pier, they'd pull the line a certain way, and all the bait would drop out," remembers Danny.

"I'd chuck it up in the air and watch the seagulls fight over the chicken necks."

More works by Rafael Alvarez can be found at his website cawww.alvarezfiction.com

He can be contacted via orlo.leini@gmail.com