July/August 2007

King Crab

Waterman Tim Holloway makes his living providing seafood lovers with soft shells

By Ben Swenson

My apprehension about arriving too early to meet Tim Holloway at Dockside Seafood quickly evaporates when I notice a line of men already hard at work cleaning and packaging oysters. By 6 a.m., they have already been here for an hour.

I have only minutes to stand on the dock and take in the reedy, brackish scent that the warm breeze pushes off the Pagan River near Smithfield before Holloway arrives by boat—the very same craft that serves as my classroom for the day. Allowing only a brief moment to exchange pleasantries, Holloway sets about preparing the Carolina skiff for a day's work on the water.

"I'll have lots of time later on to explain to you," he says. "Just find a spot. As long as you're not standing where I am now, you'll be fine." Moments later, we glide on the water toward hundreds of crab pots.

Holloway, 38, is sturdy, deliberate in speech and has with one would expect from someone who spent his whole life on the water. Unlike the vast majority of watermen, he doesn't work independently, instead returning his catch to Dockside Seafood. In return, Dockside provides him with all the items necessary to ply his trade, such as gas and crab pots, costs that independent watermen have to cover themselves.

When he is on the water, though, Holloway makes his living as a one-man operation. And as we approach a line of pots in Jones Creek, the work seems effortless for the seasoned waterman. He plucks a buoy (attached by rope to the crab pot on the bottom) from the water's surface with a hooked pole and reels it in with the assistance of a mechanized wheel on the boat's gunwale. Then, after unlatching the pot, he spills it contents onto a work surface behind the steering console, closes the pot, culls the catch, turns to steer the boat, and returns the pot to the water—all before arriving at the next buoy. It takes seconds.

Impressed with the efficiency and automation of his tempo, I fail to notice that Holloway seems to be skipping one important step: baiting the pots.

"We're fishing these pots for peeler crabs," he explains. "The crabs will go into them even if there is no bait because they feel like it's a safe place."

Peelers are blue crabs that are a few days—sometimes hours—from molting. Crabs need to shed their shells to allow their bodies to grow. When they feel this coming on, they find a place to hide, and for a few brief hours, after they molt—until their new, larger bodies harden—they are coveted soft shell crabs, a delicacy for both humans and underwater predators.

Hollow pulls a crab off the culling board to demonstrate his method of discerning which crabs are peelers. "Look at the backfin here," he says. "See the faint white line? This crab will shed in a few days."

He grabs another. "Now take a look at this one. It's different; the line is pink. This one probably has a day." Holloway tosses the peelers into different baskets according to their molting stage. As he pull more pots, I eventually get to see a "buster," a crab that has begun the process of leaving its old shell.

For the rest of this story, see the July/August issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.