Ronnie Greene has been working the waters of the York River and Chesapeake Bay for 45 years. Twenty-two years ago, he was joined by his older son Ryan, followed 14 years ago by his younger son Trevor.
On Monday morning, the three men worked seamlessly together as they offloaded 36 bushels from their Chesapeake Bay deadrise “Midnight D’Light” and spoke about the crab business, which has been good so far this year and “should be picking up soon.” They left the dock at Nixon’s Seafood in Perrin at 3 a.m. to fish their crab pots and were back at 11 a.m. After that was a trip to The Crab Company at Adner with their catch.
It was just another uneventful day in the life of a waterman—unlike the morning of Tuesday, July 29, when they must have looked like heroes to two young men who had been stranded all night on a jet ski in the middle of the York River.
Ronnie said the three of them were putting their crab pots out for the first time after a two-month hiatus from crabbing while they waited for the crabs to run. They were just below Croaker Landing near the middle of the York River when he noticed a green dot on his radar that shouldn’t have been there. He said he knows the river well and knew it wasn’t a beacon or a buoy, and since it was just after daylight, the only thing he might have expected to see would have been another waterman.
“It wasn’t stationary,” he said. “It could’ve been a boat.”
Then Trevor said he’d seen something on Facebook about two people missing in the York River, and Ronnie immediately headed toward the green dot.
“As we got closer, we could tell it was a jet ski,” he said.
Sitting on the watercraft were two young men, 18 and 20 years old, who had left the York County shoreline around 5 p.m. the afternoon before. The driver had accidentally hit the kill switch and was unable to restart the engine. They had tried to swim to shore, said Ronnie, but the current proved too strong.
“They said it was hard to sleep on a jet ski,” he said with a grin.
Ryan said they got the men in the boat, and they were really thirsty, so he gave them some water.
“The mosquitos chased them up and down the river all night long,” he said.
Trevor gave one of the young men his phone to call his mother. Afterward, “The mother called back crying and wanted to give us a reward,” said Ronnie. “I said no, getting them in the boat was reward enough.”
On their way to Gloucester Point, the men came upon the Abingdon Volunteer Fire and Rescue boat, which had joined the search, and the rescue team offered to take the two boaters. The boat’s captain was a cousin of the Greenes’, and Ryan jokingly told him, “We found them, and you’re gonna take all the credit.”
But that really didn’t matter, said Ryan. The bottom line was, “We were just glad they were all right.”
