scoop flies off the bottom. “You got to pay attention or you’ll hurt yourself.” Right now it doesn’t look very promising for him to follow in his father’s footsteps, he explains, what with the state tightly regulating the clam beds. “If they’d leave the grounds out there open,” he says, “I’d keep doing it till I was as old as my dad.”
Harbormaster Kopacz doesn’t mind taking me around some more, so we continue the tour—soon stopping to watch another boat, Miss Leslie from Poquoson, Va., come in with about 30 bushels of blue crabs. Ken Diggs and his son—you guessed it, Ken Diggs Jr.—gripe like all fishermen do about regulations, but they wouldn’t do anything else for a living. “It’s all I ever did, it’s crazy,” says the younger Diggs. “It’s like I’m the last cowboy.”
There are a lot of last cowboys here, in the so-called Small Boat Harbor, one of the