Editor’s note: This interview is the second in a series highlighting young professionals at work in the Chesapeake Bay arena. Listen to the full interview, along with others, on our Chesapeake Uncharted podcast.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Who knew there would be a massive audience on social media for videos and photos documenting the life of a crabber on the Chesapeake Bay?
Waterman Luke McFadden wasn’t sure one existed. After all, the work, which typically entails long hours in a boat and plenty of disappointment, is far from glamorous. But he gave it a go anyway.
Within three years, he has accumulated 1.6 million followers on TikTok and hundreds of thousands more on other social media sites. No one has been more surprised than the unassuming 27-year-old from Pasadena, MD.
“It never ceases to amaze me just all the different groups and demographics of people that watch me,” McFadden said. “It’s humbling to see. It’s a lot of different folks that watch it for a lot of different reasons. I think that’s great.”
The posts mostly deal with McFadden’s life on the water. They show him detaching a circle hook from the underside of a horseshoe crab, testing marshmallows as bait in a crab pot, relocating his gear farther up the Bay to keep pace with the annual crab migration and giving his boat motor a tune-up.
Sprinkled among those posts are glimpses of his personal life: a tour of his $700 truck-bed camper, the slurring aftermath of having his wisdom teeth removed, and pics from his deer hunt in Pennsylvania.
McFadden spoke to the Bay Journal recently about his rise to internet stardom and how that marketing helps sustain his direct-to-consumer sales operation. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: Most watermen come from generations of life on the Bay. But you didn’t. Help us piece together your journey.
Answer: It was always something I was interested in and wanted to do. I was just kind of obsessed with it from a young age and never could let it go.
Q: How did you end up on the water if you didn’t already have a boat in the family?
A: My parents’ friend, C. J. [Canby] — he was in [the Bay Journal film] Beautiful Swimmers Revisited — he was a waterman. I met him when I was pretty young, and I just hung around until he started taking me out with him. I’d help him work on gear in the yard, and then I’d do anything I could to basically just get involved. Eventually, I worked my way up to being on the boat. Then, when I was 18, I graduated and moved out. I built a boat basically out of junk and started my own crabbing thing. I just wrapped up my ninth year.
Q: The crabbing industry is facing big economic challenges. Why didn’t that deter you?
A: Well, I didn’t really understand the economic challenges the industry was facing at the time. I was young, dumb and wanted to go crabbing and hell-bent on doing it. I thought I would figure all the details out later.
Q: You sell directly to consumers. Why did you decide to do that instead of just selling to a buyboat or distributor?
A: I sold to distributors and middlemen and in restaurants for the first seven years or whatever. Then just the past two years, I’ve made the jump to sell direct to the customer. It seems like inevitably the guys that make it in the long run, they’ve expanded. So, selling all your crabs right to the customer is a huge step.
Q: Have you been able to pay the bills and have some stability?
A: Definitely not at first, for a very long time. The first six years of me crabbing, I was basically making enough one day to go crabbing the next day. It’s a ton of work. You’re learning a ton. I’m still learning every day.… It’s a hard industry to make money in … Now, I’m fortunate enough to have gotten married. I bought a house. But I’m certainly not rich.
Q: How did your social media platform come about?
A: I saw it as a really good way to build a business. Every business has a social media platform now. I was trying to figure out, “How can I sell my crabs in a flooded market?” There were no crab people online, really. So, it was kind of an opening in the market.
Q: How many people are watching nowadays?
A: Let’s see on my phone here. I have 1.6 million on TikTok. I have 390,000 subscribers on YouTube and 392,000
followers on Facebook and about 260,000 on Instagram.
Q: Would Luke of three years ago have expected this?
A: [Laughing] Uh, no, not at all. Not at all.
Q: What was your first viral post?
A: I had a video of putting crabs into a cooler. It was an instructional video. I had had a lot of people buying crabs off me, and they were always asking how to store them overnight. It was kind of a funny video because everything went terribly wrong. Like, I opened the basket of crabs, and they just poured out of the basket and crawled all over the yard. And I was trying to pick them up. I was like, “Man, this video went terribly.” And then I thought, “You know what? What if I just show it?”
Q: That seems to be a theme in your posts: failure.
A: With social media, traditional influencers live this tailored life where everything is so much better than you and everything always goes right. They have the best of the best. And I was like, “That’s just not my life.” I live in a life where things are always going wrong. It’s always hitting the fan. I’m always getting myself into problems that I have to bail myself out of. So, I was like, “What if what if I lean into that aspect on social media?” I would say people like to watch you win, but they love to watch you lose.
Q: Do you see yourself as a spokesman for the watermen community?
A: That’s a tricky question because just by having a lot of reach, you end up in a position where you are viewed as a spokesman.
Q: Maybe not intentionally, but unintentionally?
A: Right. I never intentionally set out to be a spokesman for watermen. There’s a lot of other guys that have been doing it a lot longer who are a lot wiser than I am. I want to portray watermen in a positive way. I feel like that’s more my wheelhouse.
Q: If there was one thing that people could do to help watermen, what would it be?
A: I would say, make an effort to buy seafood from the person that’s catching it. That’s one big way you can help. It’s keeping the money in the hands of the people that are incurring the majority of the liability and that are ultimately the most dependent on it.
Listen to the full interview here.