GLOUCESTER POINT, Va. - Under the murky waters of the York River, an eerie blur appeared suddenly on Edward Hogge's sonar, near where his 40-foot deadrise boat sailed about a mile offshore on a cool December morning.
Hogge made a hard right turn. "I'm going back to get it," he said. He called out to his wife and first mate, Cheryl. "All right, honey, get your gloves on. Get ready!" When the boat stopped, she tossed a long rope lined with hooks overboard and yanked it. "It's got something! It's heavy," Cheryl Hogge said.
Be warned: This is a ghost story. A hidden killer haunts marine life in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries: tens of thousands of baited crab traps left behind by watermen each year.
These "ghost pots" capture legions of crabs, eels, terrapins, fish, muskrats and even an occasional duck, leaving them to die. For three years starting in 2008, more than 22,000 blue crabs, male and female, were found dead in ghost pots collected by watermen such as the Hogges under a federal and state program that pays for their work. About 2,600 oyster toadfish, 950 sea snails and 430 black sea bass were killed.
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"It's like a feeding machine," said state Department of Natural Resources Secretary Doug Domenech, who recently sailed with the Hogges to see firsthand how the program works. "Animals get stuck and can't get out. So they become bait for the next animal that comes."
Watermen in Virginia are licensed to set about 300,000 crab pots each year. About 20 percent - 60,000 - are lost, according to a Virginia Institute of Marine Science estimate. The certain toll of dead animals represents those found in about 28,000 recovered pots, said Kirk Havens, director of the Coastal Watersheds Program.
The Chesapeake's iconic blue crabs have enough problems without catching a death sentence in a ghost pot. Their dangerously low population is just beginning to come back after Virginia closed the December-to-March winter fishery as part of an effort to protect them.
Each ghost pot traps about 50 crabs per year, according to an estimate by the institute. The killing continues all year, even when the waters are closed to crab harvesting.
The program to remove the pots has been a success, Havens said. But it is to end a four-year run when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stops funding it after this year's haul in March.
