by Earl Swift
One dark, frigid morning, I make the questionable decision to join Ooker and Allen Ray Crockett aboard Allen Ray’s forty-two-foot Claudine Sue. We motor out to a rock five miles northeast of Tangier, where we find forty-one other boats waiting for the dawn. The crazy choreography of too many dredges working too small a piece of water doesn’t differ much from oystering on the Rappahannock. We’re often within five or six feet of Leon, who’s brought Short Ed Parks aboard the Betty Jane as his mate, and at times sidle even closer to other deadrises competing for space.
What sets the day apart is the wind. It builds out of the northwest as soon as the sun has cleared the horizon. By eight o’clock, the seas have split into deep troughs and three-foot ridges, and waves smacking the hull send shivers through the entire boat. By nine o’clock, the wind is up to twenty-five miles an hour, and the seas run a hissing, frothy four feet. The deck rolls and lurches. Spray leaps over the gunwales. An occasional wave comes over the bow, vaults the cabin, and lands with a clap on and around us.
I brace against the cabin doorjamb, struggling to stay on my feet. From there I can see a framed picture mounted to the cabin’s plywood interior. It’s a print of a 1950 painting by Warner Sallman, a Chicago artist who specialized in religious images. This one’s called Christ Our Pilot and depicts a young mariner clad in a muscle shirt and gripping the wheel of a wooden ship snared in a titanic storm at sea. Behind him stands a ghostly and outsized Jesus, left hand resting on the mariner’s shoulder, right hand pointing the way to safety. The image is standard equipment on Tangier workboats.
Ooker and Allen Ray are too busy to pay the cold and wet much mind. No way are we going in before they have their sixteen bushels. “We’ve been out here when, really, we shouldn’t have been out here—waves coming in the boat, shells blowing at you,” Ooker says, offering what he apparently mistakes for reassurance. He nods toward Allen Ray. “He’s right salty.”
I watch the Betty Jane, twenty feet away, as it yaws, pitches, and rolls all at once. This is not the little barcat, the Betty Jane II, in which Leon scrapes for peelers, but a bigger, older, and notoriously leaky deadrise. As its dredge comes up, Leon and Short Ed climb onto its culling board to guide the device into position, release its load, then clamber back to the deck. Leon is closing in on his eighty-sixth birthday. Short Ed is eighty-one. Over and over, they do it.
“Kyowkin’!” Ooker yells over the motor, the clattering chain, the wind. “Breezy, breezy, lemon squeezy.”
“Rough,” Allen Ray says, as he guides the boat into a lick.
“Roughest day of the year,” Ooker says. He looks over his shoulder at me. “We’d think twice before we bring you again!”
Tomorrow, Ooker says, the weather is supposed to be far nastier. Temperatures tonight will fall below twenty degrees, and it speaks of even more wind. “We ain’t coming out,” he says. “But the headhunters will, the crazy people. Like Lonnie, he’ll probably be out here. They’ve got to do it. It’s psychological.”
I think about that the next morning, when I leave the island for Crisfield. I step out of the house with my luggage to find the bay black and churning and a cold northwest wind blowing steady at thirty miles per hour. At the mailboat dock, Beth Thomas tells me that Brett has opted not to make the morning’s run. Going over wouldn’t be bad, but the weather’s expected to get meaner, and he’s worried about the return trip. It’s cold enough for spray to turn to ice. There’s passenger safety to consider, and as high as the steel-hulled Courtney Thomas sits in the water, he’s wary of the extra weight affecting the vessel’s manners.
In the mailboat’s place, Mark Haynie is running the Sharon Kay III, so I lug my bags down the dock road to Main Street and hike up Meat Soup to the county dock near its north end. The Sharon Kay III has yet to arrive. I huddle with a knot of other passengers out at the dock’s tip, hunched against the cold and gusting wind. One is a solid fellow approaching middle age whom I don’t recognize, but whose ravaged ball cap and chin stubble mark him as either a waterman or a tugboater. I ask his name. “Jason Charnock,” he says.
“Who are your folks?” I ask—my standard question for establishing a new acquaintance’s place in the island’s family tree.
“What, like my parents? Ed Charnock is my dad,” he replies.
“Ed Charnock? Eddie Jacks?”
He chuckles. “Yeah, Eddie Jacks.”
I introduce myself, tell him I’m a fan of his dad, that I’ve found that the few words he has to say are usually worth hearing. He nods, smiles, thanks me. I realize that at this first meeting, I already know quite a bit about Jason. I know he’s married to Carol and Lonnie Moore’s daughter, Loni Renee. I’ve met his kids, whom Carol often babysits; Lonnie’s boat is named for two of them. And I know that Ed’s mate on the Henrietta C. is his son—they’ve worked together for more than twenty years—and while Annette has two sons on the mainland, I’m pretty sure Ed has only one boy of his own. So here he is: Jason Charnock, a waterman like his father—whose own forebears worked the water like their fathers, who were the sons of other captains still. Sorting through Tangier’s web of family links is something like playing three-dimensional chess.
Over Jason’s shoulder I can see the curving dock where Lonnie ties up the Alona Rahab. As Ooker predicted, it’s not there. Lonnie’s out on the rock. Mark Haynie pulls up in his boat, and his chilled passengers climb aboard. The Sharon Kay III is big as deadrises go—forty-six feet long, fourteen wide, with a spacious cabin and the forward half of its open deck shrouded in plastic. In all, there’s protected seating for twenty or so and space for cargo and smokers aft of the shroud. Still, it’s nearly twenty feet shorter than the mailboat, and tons lighter. The bundled passengers around me chat lazily as we pull away from the dock, but a nervous energy charges the air. We’re in for an exciting ride.
It doesn’t take long to start. Even before we’ve rounded the southeast corner of Uppards, waves are crashing heavily into the boat’s nose. Halfway across the open water between Uppards and Smith Island, the seas top four feet, and the Sharon Kay III rolls into troughs, slides sideways, and draws circles with its corkscrewing bow. Gusts batter and crackle the tenting around us and drench the portside windows in spray.
We hug the Smith Island shore, but the low marsh offers little protection, and as the wind builds the deck underfoot tilts every which way without warning. I glance into the cabin. The captain is sitting alert but relaxed behind the wheel, which he guides with one hand. He looks utterly unworried. Then I turn my gaze to the boat’s stern. The sound has become a maelstrom of heaving water, pushed one way by the tide, slammed the other by the wind—big, muscular waves colliding with great eruptions of spray, and parting to expose deep chasms that seem sure to swallow us up. The scene is all the more fearsome for its absence of color: All is black and dark gray, save for the foam jetting off the peaks. I struggle to look bored.
Ah, but then we make the turn east to cross the sound. The wind howls, and I recall the waves of a few minutes ago with nostalgia. The Sharon Kay III becomes a bad carnival ride, and unwelcome thoughts intrude: The boat’s forward movement is its only defense in this craziness. If the engine quits now, we’ll take a wave over the stern and we’ll go down, and it’ll happen fast. How long can one survive in forty-degree water?
I dare another glance aft and resolve not to repeat the mistake. Instead, I study the faces of my fellow passengers. Several appear to be dozing. A couple meet my gaze and smile. A few chat as if they’re sitting at a sidewalk café. I’m the only one of us who seems the least bit unnerved.
I peer southward, down the sound. Somewhere out that way, invisible behind the spray, Lonnie Moore is oystering.
AND SO WINTER closes over Tangier Island. Nor’westers sweep in, cold and damp. The annual Christmas cantata brings a crowd to Swain Memorial, and Christmas Eve services fill both churches. New Year’s passes with a scattering of fireworks and without public toasts to 2017. One Friday in early January, sno
w starts to fall. Swirled by high winds, it collects a foot deep on the roads and marshes and drifts waist-high against houses and fences. It is slow to melt and immobilizes golf-cart traffic for days.
Still, the watermen of Tangier take to their boats. “Thank the Lord for the good oystering season our men are having,” Carlene says a week after the blizzard, during prayer requests at New Testament. “The work’s getting harder, but they’ve been able to catch their limits.”
Oystering closes at February’s end, and the cycle of life on the water, a rhythm grown familiar over generations, starts anew. The island’s watermen dismantle their dredging rigs, returning their boats to the simpler setups they’ll use for crabbing. A good many pull their boats out of the water to scrape down and repaint their hulls.
The hard-potters are back on the water by mid-March, cotton layered thick under their oilskins—Lonnie and Woodpecker and their mates, Ed Charnock and Jason, plus dozens of others. Irene Eskridge and Stuart Parks prepare Fisherman’s Corner for the coming hordes. Principal Denny Crockett and his wife, Glenna, do the same at Hilda Crockett’s Chesapeake House. Orders are placed for souvenir Tangier ball caps and T-shirts to stock the gift shops. Tour buggy drivers and museum volunteers enjoy the final weeks of quiet.
At his crab shanty, Ooker builds eighty new crab pots, preparing for the peeler season, and gives interviews to a rising tide of visiting journalists fascinated by this disappearing island that voted for a president who’s called climate change a hoax.
Jason and Ed Charnock aboard the Henrietta C., May 2016. (ELI CHRISTMAN)
Twenty-Two
MANY AN ISLANDER WILL SAY IT WAS RIGHT KYOWKING THAT afternoon, that the water was as rough as they’d seen it. But Monday, April 24, 2017, dawned far less daunting, with winds out of the east-northeast at twenty to twenty-five—conditions that might draw a complaint from Leon in the Situation Room, but nothing the crabbers of Tangier hadn’t experienced on too many mornings to count. All knew it was expected to breeze up, that the afternoon spoke of stronger wind. Most planned to pull their last pot well before the seas got high.
So it was that Ed Charnock backed the Henrietta C. out of its slip at the north end of Meat Soup at about five that morning, while his son, Jason, readied the bait and bushel baskets out on deck. They motored from the boat channel’s wave-scoured mouth and turned southwest, toward hundreds of pots they’d set in six long rows, the nearest about seven miles away.
It was a daunting place to work, surrounded by so much water, such a long way from anywhere. But along with Lonnie Moore and Ooker’s son Woodpecker, the Charnocks ranged far from home as a matter of habit: They’d never been much for following the pack, and went where they thought the crabs were. Besides, father and son knew their business. Eddie Jacks had worked the water for fifty-four years. At seventy, he was a captain’s captain, an expert boat handler and among the island’s most ambitious and successful crabbers. Jason, a fit and strong forty, had been his full-time mate for twenty-one years. And their boat was among the prettiest and most proven around: Among Tangier’s deadrises, graceful all, the sublime arc from its forepeak to stern set the Henrietta C. apart. It looked longer, lower, and more delicate than it was. Fast and stable, built twenty-eight years before of fir and yellow pine, it might have been Jerry Frank Pruitt’s masterpiece.
Mindful that the wind would pick up, the Charnocks planned to pull just three hundred pots—more if they had time, less if the weather turned early. At about six they reached their nearest pots, two rows running north–south near the submerged wreck of a navy target ship—the old battleship Texas, renamed the San Marcos and pounded into a rusty tangle southwest of the island. The thirty pots they pulled there were disappointing, so they abandoned those rows for the four they’d set another five miles out, at the edge of the channel used by big ships bound for Baltimore. On the way they passed Paul Wheatley in the Elizabeth Kelly. He was Ed’s son-in-law, married to his oldest daughter, Kelly. Ed’s grandson Jonathon was his mate. Everyone waved.
Better luck waited out by the channel, where their pots came up filled with crabs. But as they worked up one row and down the next, the wind notched upward. By midmorning it was blowing twenty-five to thirty, and the seas sprang to four feet. The Charnocks kept pulling pots. A little wind didn’t bother them, especially that morning. All the previous week they’d been mired in the tedious business of moving their pots, fine-tuning their placement, and they’d looked forward to this Monday as the payoff.
And so it was: By late morning, they’d fished up only two-thirds of their pots, but the deck was crowded with thirty-six bushels of crabs. Now, with the weather souring by the minute, they decided to head in. They set off to the northeast, directly into the wind and five-foot seas. Ed pushed the boat hard, but it was slow going, especially with something like 1,400 pounds of crab aboard. They were halfway home, just past the San Marcos, when at about 12:45 P.M. they noticed the boat felt soft. It wasn’t quick to answer the throttle or turns of the wheel, seemed lazy.
They knew what it meant. The Henrietta C. was taking on water.
That, by itself, was no cause for alarm. A wooden boat is semipermeable, and water finds its way in as a matter of course. But the Charnocks knew they’d have to address it. In these heavy seas, with the boat already riding low under the weight of their catch, they could little afford the extra burden of water in the bilge. It settled the boat lower in the chop, forced the diesel to work harder, left them susceptible to high waves.
And the waves were high, indeed, and coming at them from all directions. Tangiermen would talk about that afternoon for a long time after, and on one point they’d all agree: As the day progressed, the bay became anarchic, the waves building to six feet high and crashing in from all sides. They’d say they were strange, corduroy seas, with high crests close aside deep troughs—seas that don’t rock a boat so much as bludgeon it.
LEON MCMANN HAS TOLD ME that the key to safety at sea is pretty simple: “You have to be sure you’re getting rid of more water than you’re taking on,” he said. “You get into trouble if you start taking on more water than you’re getting off.” The Henrietta C. was fitted with two pieces of equipment to achieve this. The first was a bilge pump, which acts just like a basement sump pump—it’s tripped on by the presence of water and runs until the water’s gone. Ed Charnock’s boat had two of them. One had been busted for a while, but the other was running fine.
The second was an automatic bailer, a short brass pipe, 1.5 inches in diameter, that passes through a boat’s bottom. The boat’s forward motion creates a vacuum at the pipe’s lower end, which sucks water out of the bilge and overboard. The pipe is capped when not in use and is usually reached through a hatch in the deck just aft of the engine box. Jason took the helm while Eddie Jacks opened that hatch and, down on his knees, reached almost shoulder deep into the bilge to uncap the bailer. Most of his arm was in water.
In the cabin, Jason listened to the marine radio, which crackled with watermen complaining about how rough it was. Most were in Tangier or Pocomoke Sound, far less exposed than the Henrietta C. to the effects of an east–northeast wind; one was Lonnie Moore, Jason’s father-in-law, headed for home with his limit of crabs. Rocking and rolling out here, the chatter went. These are five-footers, for sure. She’s a-blowing.
If you think it’s rough there, Jason radioed, you ought to see how nasty it is over this way.
Out on deck, Ed had the bailer open, but it wasn’t pulling any water. Slow as they were moving into the wind, no vacuum had formed beneath the pipe. The remedy: They’d turn away from the wind, get up some speed, get the bailer working. Once they had the water out, they’d turn back for home.
Rather than surrender all the progress they’d made so far, Jason elected not to run with the wind but to turn solid to it—to head northwest, with the wind hitting them abeam. It seemed to work. They got up some speed. The bailer pulled water. Lonnie, reaching the safety of the channel into Tangier, ra
dioed: Are you okay?
Yes, everything’s fine, Jason replied. We got some water in, but no concern. We’re going to run solid to it until we got it out.
Except that it didn’t happen. The bailer sucked water at a furious rate, and the sole bilge pump drew hard, but the bilge remained flooded—in fact, more water seemed to pile into the space with each minute. And now Jason noticed something he’d never seen before. Water was collecting on the cabin floor. He checked the windows, found no leak, and realized that it was coming up from below.
With that, the bilge pump failed. The bailer was now the only route for the flooding to leave the boat, and the little pipe was clearly no match for the load. Jason responded with an emergency maneuver. He put the boat’s tail to the wind and opened the throttle wide. The Henrietta C. surged westward, running with the storm. So it ran, right up to the moment the engine quit.
In the weird quiet that followed, Ed shouted from the deck: Jason, you better holler for somebody. And get your oilskins off. Get them off right now.
JASON SHOUTED FOR HELP over the VHF channel monitored by Tangiermen. It was near two o’clock, and few other crabbers were still on the water. It took a couple of tries before he raised Billy Brown, an islander who was bucking the storm near Crisfield, sixteen or seventeen miles away. We’re in trouble, he told Billy. We’re taking on water, a lot of it. We need help. Better get ahold of somebody.
Billy: Who should I call?
Jason: Lonnie. Call Lonnie.
He had no time to say more. The water leaped to his waist. His father, out on deck: Get out the cabin, Jason!
He scanned the cabin for the two life vests they kept on hand, spotted one in a storage locker a few feet away, waded in that direction. But as he reached for it the water jumped again, to chest-high, and he lost his grip on the vest, had to feel under the water to find it. His father’s voice again: Get out the cabin! Jason turned for the door. Before he reached it, water filled the cabin to the overhead.