Maryland waterman Luke McFadden has built much of his audience around the dirty, unglamorous parts of working the Chesapeake. His latest film with photographer Jay Fleming might be his most pointed yet: a long-line trip out of Sandy Point State Park targeting invasive blue catfish in the upper Bay, a species that started life in the Chesapeake as a 1973 Virginia stocking experiment and now sits at the top of the food chain.
The framing is set early. "We call these catfish malicious but delicious because they're malicious in the sense that they're eating a lot of native fish in the [Chesapeake] Bay, crabs and shellfish, but they're delicious in the sense that they're really good fish to eat," McFadden says, hauling shad-baited circle hooks over the rail.
The gear is a long line — "essentially a trot line with hooks" — running up to 1,200 feet on circle hooks baited with cut mud shad. McFadden holds a $15 invasive-catfish licence the state of Maryland actively wants more watermen to take up. The trip is also a teaching shift; two young helpers cut bait and clip on hooks while Fleming runs the camera between fish.
The origin story is the part McFadden returns to. "In 1973 the state of Virginia actually introduced the blue catfish into the Potomac River — Potomac, James, York and Rappahannock," he says. "They were trying to introduce a new sport fish like a game fish for people to go out and catch. And where they really went wrong was that they assumed that blue catfish were a freshwater species and they were going to stay in the freshwater parts of these rivers."
They did not. Every one of those rivers feeds the brackish Chesapeake. "Come to find out, they like to travel and they can live in pretty much anything. We've seen these things in completely fresh water and we've seen these things in almost ocean water."
The ecological impact is now central to how Maryland talks about its rockfish problem. McFadden points at the gap left in the bay's food web. "These fish are kind of filling the ecological void [that rockfish have left] in a lot of ways, and they're eating at a voracious pace," he says. "You do not get that big by being too picky. Caught them up to 50 pounds here and they get even bigger than that. The average fish is 15 to 20 lb. A 15 to 20 lb fish with a mouth that's 6 inches across can eat almost anything it wants to."
McFadden points to the 2018 rain year as the inflection. "These catfish came out of the rivers because the salinity in the bay dropped and then really colonised the upper bay," he says. "This is the most important spawning ground for stripe bass on the east coast. So people are starting to think that these blue catfish in the upper bay might have something to do with the decline in rockfish spawning success."
The market piece is where Fleming's photographic project comes in. Watermen are getting 65 to 85 cents a pound at the better buyers, with smaller 8 to 12 lb fish actually fetching more than the big ones because they fillet cleaner. McFadden's read on what the fishery does for the industry is blunt. "There's less and less guys that are fishing, crabbing, netting, you name it," he says. "Something like this, where they're basically opening the door and saying catch as many as you possibly can, it could potentially be something that could save a lot of watermen and give them more opportunity to make money in times that they otherwise wouldn't."
The day's tally hits a personal record. "This might be the best day that I've ever had catfishing in terms of weight. We have four trash cans full and three baskets," McFadden says with one line still to fish. "I would say we're close to 900 lb and we still have one line to fish."
The sign-off doubles as a public service announcement. Fleming has a catfish cook-off lined up at the Annapolis Maritime Museum on May 16, with multiple restaurants — including some Michelin-starred chefs — building dishes around the species. "Pretty cool to see it happen. Go out there, catch some blue catfish. Try it if you see it on a menu. You're going to like it. I promise."
McFadden's closing line is the one that will travel: "900 lbs of catfish that won't be eating blue crabs, perch, menhaden, [striped] bass. Bad day to be a blue catfish. Good day to be a native species."