A Skiff for Tending Peeler Crabs

by Pete Lesher

A SIMPLE, SMALL FLAT-BOTTOM SKIFF is all you need to tend peeler crab floats. Charles H. Parks, founder of a four-generation Hoopers Island seafood packing house, built such a utilitarian skiff for his own use, perhaps in the late 1920s, when he expanded his business to process crabs as well as oysters. With a cross-planked bottom, a plumb stem, sides with little flare, and a transom with almost no rake, measuring just 10 feet, 5 inches long by 3 feet, 10 inches wide, it is the simplest of watercraft.

When the Chesapeake Bay crab industry emerged at the opening of the 20th century, much of the work in Maryland revolved around picking crabmeat out of steamed hard crabs, work largely performed by women. Soft crab production, on the other hand, was centered farther south, particularly around Crisfield. Because crabs remain soft for only a few hours after wriggling out of their outgrown shells, watermen only occasionally catch them in this transition while dragging nets or “scrapes” through the grassy shallows. More are caught as “peelers” when a telltale red outline appears on their swimmer fins, a sign that they will shed their hard carapace in less than three days. To wait them out until the vulnerable moment arrives, watermen bring them back to place in “floats,” which are then tended around the clock to remove the soft shells before they either harden or are cannibalized by an indiscriminate hungry neighbor.

Watermen constructed rectangular, open-top floating live boxes with vertical wooden slats spaced about 3/8 of an inch apart. This design allowed water to flow through but prevented crabs from escaping. Arrays of these peeler floats filled the creeks and protected waterfronts around Crisfield, Deal Island, Smith Island, Hoopers Island, and other watermen’s communities every summer through the first half of the 20th century. Parks had about eight large peeler floats adjacent to the wharf behind his seafood packing house. To keep vigil on the crabs every three hours or so, he built his own small, lowsided, shallow-draft boat.

Parks tried to ride out the dangerous August 1933 hurricane at his business but was found face down in the skiff two days after the storm subsided. That same low-sided skiff somehow saved his life.

The days of crab floats were numbered by the late 1950s, when Joseph H. Wirtz of West Point, Va., designed and built troughs—open tanks built on the shore or on a pier with water pumped and piped in from the harbor, yet curiously still dubbed “floats.” Shade over the troughs or pens reduced crab mortality from the sun, the pumps introduced aeration to the water, and nets reduced the theft of soft crabs by gulls. With operations moved ashore, small skiffs were no longer needed, and most of these simple, home-built craft deteriorated.

Virgil G. Hobbs, Jr., grandson of Charles H. Parks, recalls going out many times as a five- or six-year-old to “fish up” crabs with his grandfather in the skiff while spending the summer on Hoopers Island. Parks stood to pole the skiff from his wharf to the shallow water where the floats were anchored. He attached a flat net to a 6-foot pole for fishing up the soft crabs, and the other end of the pole propelled the skiff. Hobbs was trained by his grandfather to hold the skiff against the side of the peeler float—an ideal job to keep the young boy repeatedly engaged through the day. When his grandson wasn’t in the boat to hold on, Parks carried a second pole to hold the skiff in place as he netted soft crabs.

By the 1960s, Charles H. Parks Seafood had passed to the second generation and was operated by Sanxton “Sam” Parks. Sam Parks never took to the soft crab operation, which he sold off to his nephew, Kenneth Ruark, who moved it farther down the island. From that point, the skiff was stored in the attic of the Parks Seafood packing house on the shore of Back Creek in the village of Fishing Creek until it finally closed and sold out of the family in 2012.

Hobbs donated the skiff to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in 2020, still remarkably preserved, nearly unchanged since it was last used. ★

Floats for peeler crabs once filled waterfronts in watermen’s communities around Tangier Sound, a sight depicted in this postcard. Collection of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.