Course of The Waterman

Seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft descended from a long line of Chesapeake waterman -- river royalty -- knows where he is going. He will follow the water like his father grandfather and generations of men before him. The work is backbreaking and often dangerous yet framed by the breathtaking beauty of the Chesapeake; it is a bred-in-the-bone life. But it is also a dying livelihood. Fish stocks are plummeting and with them the harvests. Watermen unable to earn a living are being forced to give up their time-honored way of life. Yet Bailey is a Kraft---river royalty---with the Kraft gift for finding fish coded into his genes. He has a sense of purpose and belonging until the day his father shatters his lifelong plans. Suddenly he must fight the people he loves most including his best friend to hang on to his birthright. Set on the Chesapeake Bays Eastern Shore Course of the Waterman is the coming-of-age story of Bailey Kraft; his tough and determined little sister Hannah; his best friend Booty; and Bootys bitter alcoholic father Tud. Bailey faces fear loss and wrenching changes; yet amidst it all he glimpses the unexpected possibilities that life can offer.Like the Kraft men before him Bailey has river water in his veins and a peculiar talent for finding fish: the Krafts are river royalty. But every year the haul is less impressive and supporting a family by fishing is becoming increasingly difficult. Early in the book Baileys father Orrin announces that he wants his son to go to college to have options that he didnt have. This change in plan is wholly unwelcome: Bailey had expected to fish full-time after finishing high school; he would have quit school to do so had he been allowed. But responding to his fathers bombshell is only the first of a great many challenges Bailey must meet in the course of the story--hard work in difficult sometimes life threatening circumstances not least among them. Bailey is surrounded by a handful of characters who are as vividly imagined as he is: his parents and younger sister and the Warrens Tud and his son Booty the latter more brother to Bailey than friend. R_obson indeed has fleshed out her characters and explored their interlocking relationships--all of which are changed during the course of this story--more fully than most authors can in twice as many pages. Robsons book explores the obligations of friendship and the bonds stronger than rivalries and animosities that hold together a community of people who need one another to survive--the pull and haul of relationship gift and obligation. Like her characters Robson grew up on the Chesapeake and she worked for years as a deckhand on a coastal tug. (She tells her story in Woman in the Wheelhouse.) She couldnt have written this book the way she did without that experience. Readers like myself who arent familiar with the life she describes--most of us surely--will encounter some unfamiliar vocabulary here but context is sufficient to get the meaning across. The first paragraph immerses the reader at once in the life of a Chesapeake waterman: The trotline groaned over the roller as it came up out of the blue-black Elizabeth River on Marylands Eastern Shore. Braced against the boats wooden coaming seventeen-year-old Bailey Kraft was poised dip net ready scanning for the bait twisted every eight feet or so into the mile-ong line. That was where the crab would be--if there were a crab. As he watched a shadow rose from the dark water and came into focus sharpening into olive shell and blue-green claws that clung to a frayed gray eel chunk tied to the line. When the crab broke the surface Bailey leaned out scooped it up and dumped it into the bushel basket at his feet.