On her boat, Jill unhooks the lid of an oyster cage; she and a helper even out the shells and harvest those 3 inches or larger for market.

Eventually, she found her sea legs, and today, while her husband, Andy, finishes up his final years at the power plant, Jill runs the family business full-time until he joins her. During the summer, she trotlines for crabs, and in the winter, she dredges and tongs for wild oysters. She also raises her farmed oysters year-round, and on the side, works as a firefighter and EMT.

Some women disdain the word “waterwoman,” feeling that, despite their equally hard work, it sets them apart from the men, but Jill embraces the term.

“It’s too easy to go out there and become one of the guys,” she says. “I still like girly things. I wear makeup on the boat. As long as I can, as dirty as I get, I’m still going to be a lady.”

By 11 a.m., the boat is full throttle, cutting across the glassy river toward its front-yard dock, a few dozen oysters jangling in the baskets by Jill’s feet. She loves the freedom of her work but is always at the mercy of the wind and tide, which today goes back out sometime before noon.

“Mother Nature dictates my schedule,” Jill says, “and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like me.”

But bad weather doesn’t matter much when you’re working on the bay. You add layers, you peel them off. You get dirty and wet. You deal.

“You can wake up in the worst mood, but the water is medicinal,” Jill says. “We see something new every day. We’re always bringing up all kinds of life: mud crabs, soft crabs, clams, eels.”

“And if you’re still feeling crappy?” she says, giving a knowing grin as she flies over the water. “Unhook the boat and go wide open for a little while.”

Jill gets splashed with water and mud as she pulls a black cage full of baby oysters from the bottom of the Patuxent River onto the culling box of her boat.

Jill stands on her front yard dock at the edge of Broomes Island in Calvert County.

You can’t be afraid to get dirty while working on the water. Dirt and mud comes with the trade.

Jill steers her boat south, out onto the Patuxent River, where she has a 15-acre oyster farm.

Tucked away near Nans Cove, Jill and her husband, Andy, have a peaceful waterfront property, where they also run their wholesale business, Patuxent Seafood Company.

Like their male counterparts, women like Crystal and Jill are working to keep the seafood industry alive in these changing times. On these tiny edges of earth, watermen, let alone women, are considered a dying breed. Fewer and fewer young folks are following in their parents’ footsteps, they say, and across the board, commercial licenses are limited, and equipment comes with quite a cost.

“It’s hard to make a living on the water,” says Steen from The Watermen’s Museum. “There’s less to catch and more regulations. The money’s just not there.”

Nonetheless, a few women are just starting out, and others are continuing the work of a lifetime. The tides change by the minute, but as sure as the sun will rise, Lois Lednum will be out on the water before it does.

At 4 a.m. in the middle of May, her 40-foot fishing boat, the Lois Ann, is heading out of its slip beneath the Tilghman Island drawbridge. At that time of day, everything is sapphire blue—the water, the sky, the other boats—all save for the white fog on the front lights and the little red glow of the heated cedar cabin. Inside, Lois keeps warm as her husband, Dickie, steers out into the morning night.

Before sunup, they’ve crossed the Choptank River and are set up just outside of Royal Oak. He guides the boat as she drops three trotlines into Irish Creek, each attached to weighted buoys and tied with orange bags of razor clams, every 11 feet. “Trick or treat bags,” Lois calls them, as they disappear to the bottom, her eyes focused on their fall. A cool breeze picks up and laps across the water, a sign of coming rain.

Just after high school, Lois and Dickie were married at age 18. A lifelong waterman, he worked the bay while she stayed home, taking care of their four sons. But once the boys were grown, she woke with him before the dawn and took to the water, too.

Without fail, Lois always wears a touch of pink lipstick.

For Lois, it was never a question.

“When our youngest turned 12, Dickie asked me about going oystering, and I said alright,” she says matter-of-factly. “We figured we’d make more money, and more money is better for everybody. And back then, the money was good.”

She liked to work, having grown up milking cows with her father on their family farm near Easton, and in no time, she was culling oysters and catching crabs, baiting line and fixing the boat, like she still does today at 75 years of age.

“I like to stay busy,” she says. “I can’t stand being cooped up inside.”

On Sundays, their only day off in the summer, she tends to her growing garden and takes to the open road with Dickie on the backseat of their cherry-red Harley.

“And you know what she did yesterday?” he says, with proud disbelief. “As soon as we got off the boat, she went home and mowed the lawn.”

With the trotlines set, Dickie hooks one over a roller on the starboard side of the boat and keeps a ready dip net as the orange bags begin to rise. Every few feet, a little white belly comes with them, dangling on the bait like a diamond earring.

In one fell swoop, he scoops the crabs out of the water and dumps them into the washtub at his side, where Lois, armed with her wooden measuring stick and steel tongs, picks up the skittering shells and places them into one of two baskets by size.

If they’re too small, or too soft from their last shed, she plops their wriggling bodies overboard and calls out, “Go home, and grow up!”

She doesn’t want to jinx herself, but she’s only been bitten once.

On the way back in, Lois bags razor clams as bait for the next day.

Lois inside the Lois Ann.

Well before sunup, the morning seems to wear a faint veil of blue.

After nearly 60 years of marriage, Lois and Dickie still work together like each other’s right hands.

Lois guides a trotline into Irish Creek, a quiet narrow waterway located near Royal Oak in Talbot County.

A great blue heron sits along the shoreline.

After Dickie scoops the crab out of the water and into a washtub, Lois grabs the skittering shell with steel tongs and places it into a wooden basket.

On this calm morning, an old waterfowl hunting blind has a near-perfect reflection on the glass-like water.

Though he’s soft-spoken and a little hard at hearing, Dickie has the familial, guttural laugh of a favorite uncle.

Lois then ties each bag back onto the trotline so it’s ready to go in the morning.

Once full, each bushel is closed shut and put off to the side. They will later be sold to local seafood dealers beneath the Tilghman Island drawbridge on their way back in.

The day begins to break as Lois and Dickie run the boat over the lines. They work in quiet tandem, creating rhythms in their tasks. Back and forth, up and down, in and out, like the tides.

There’s no radio onboard for playing Lois’s beloved country music, but there’s still a sort of soundtrack: the chug of the diesel engine, the shifting of gears, the chirp of chatty osprey, the sound of crab shells hitting the bucket with a whack.

Little hints of affection are exchanged—a smile, a “honey,” a few good-humored jabs—and it’s obvious that, without each other, the work wouldn’t be the same.

“I tell him now he’s a spoiled brat,” she jokes. “He won’t go out if I don’t.”

By 3 p.m., after dozens of runs, they’ve filled three bushel baskets, which they’ll drop off for sale beneath the bridge. Dickie finishes his final line as Lois begins to delicately bag the next day’s bait. Tomorrow, they’ll do it all over again. And for the foreseeable tomorrows after that. For as long as they can, Lois says.

Her gray-blond curls blow in the breeze, and even after an accident with an oyster dredge left her with limited use of her left hand, her fingers move lithely, like she could do it in her sleep.

Every so often, despite the mud and muck, Lois’s pink lipstick cracks into a gentle smile.

“They used to say that when the locusts were in bloom, the crabs would be catching,” she whispers, looking off into the distance at white blossoms blowing in a nearby tree.