It’s pretty easy for watermen to lose their crab pots out on the turbulent waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
The cage-like traps are attached to the surface by a line and buoy system stretching deep into the water. Those lines can get sliced by passing boats, blown around by storms or stuck in the mud, said Ralph Bonniville, who’s been crabbing locally for almost five decades.
“Every spring down in the bay, you lose a lot,” he said.
Crabbers often lose around 20% of their pots each season, according to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at William & Mary, adding up to roughly 145,000 at the bottom of the bay in any given year.
Bonniville is part of a VIMS program working to recover many of those “ghost” crab pots littering local waterways.
The school received an $8 million grant in 2023 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. (Funding through that law is now a target of the Trump administration.)
Over the next several years, VIMS will distribute the money for work to retrieve derelict fishing gear from protected ecosystems.
That includes the local effort, but also projects in California, Florida, Delaware, Maryland, New York and even the island nation of Palau in the western Pacific Ocean.
Kirk Havens, director of VIMS’ Center for Coastal Resources Management, said a secondary goal is to collect better data on where the gear is being lost.
“The idea here is we could have a better handle on how to address this issue (and) support the local communities and fisherpersons,” he said.
Abandoned crab pots pose navigational issues, impact sensitive ecosystems and entrap all sorts of animal species, including turtles, sea bass, muskrats and diving ducks, Havens said.
“When the watermen are working their pots, they can generally release a lot of these animals when they pull them up,” he said. “But when they're lost and just sitting down on the bottom, when these (species) get in there, they will generally end up dying. Then they kind of serve as bait to other animals and then those get trapped. So it becomes a never-ending cycle.”
The VIMS program is a continuation of efforts that started more than 15 years ago, Havens said.
At the time, the blue crab population was in dire straits. Virginia shut down the winter crab dredge fishery to help protect the species, which put watermen out of work that season.
Then-Gov. Tim Kaine came up with a concept to put them to work cleaning up the bay instead, Havens said.
“The idea was we could have them go out and remove these lost and abandoned traps, which are still capturing and killing crabs,” he said. “They could go out during the winter time when they normally would have been out and get paid to pull these things out.”
The program removed more than 34,000 traps over six years, he said. The effort also collected GPS locations of the recovered pots, allowing scientists and fisheries economists to study the issue.
Officials concluded that removing the lost traps, which compete against crabbers’ active traps, increased their harvest in the Virginia portion of the Chesapeake Bay by more than $33 million in those six years, Havens said.
The removal process only happens during the wintertime off-season, when watermen including Bonniville and E.C. Hogge are recruited to help.
The pair set out on a cold recent morning on the York River near the Coleman Bridge.
First they used sonar to detect crab pots in the water. Then they steered the boat to the latitude and longitude to get to work.
Hogge took the helm and circled the target, while Bonniville used a drag system with a rope line and hook to pull up the pot. Inside they found some live blue crabs and tossed them back into the river.
The cages then usually head to the dump because they’re too rusted to be worth much, Bonniville said.
The pots have gotten so expensive, he said, that watermen are trying harder than ever not to lose them in the first place.
“Years ago they were inexpensive. You cut one off you’d just say, ‘I ain’t worried about that.’ But now they’re not like that. Now if you miss one, we try to get it back.”
