With his brackish waterman drawl, movie star teeth, and constant struggle with all things mechanical, electrical and crustacean, Luke McFadden is an anomaly everywhere he goes.
“I’m always building stuff, fixing stuff, breaking stuff, you know? And people really like that kind of stuff,” McFadden said. “I’m not like your average, whatever, YouTuber … all of social media is basically, like, this tailored, like, fake persona.”
He’s not into being a social media star, and social media certainly doesn’t seem like the place to celebrate the life of a rough-hewn waterman. But it’s working.
Fouled propellers, fruitless days on the water, crabs jumping out of the pot and running from him. He shows it all.
And his 1.6 million TikTok followers love it.
He never meant to become a part of influencer culture. At first he just posted a video of a carpentry project he’d been toying with — a cool, intricate thing called an “evolution door.” And it went viral. So he wondered if videos from his daily life crabbing — from the romance of sunrise on the water to the agony of snarled lines — would have the same appeal.
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He was right.
“I just wake up and go to work in a daze and s--- just hits the fan, and I just turn on a camera, do some editing and then put it on the internet,” he said.
Though his main goal was always selling more crabs, he also realized the platform he commands means he could do some good. He talks about the sea creatures and the tough life of making a living when you’re at the whim of them. He speaks for the watermen whose livelihood is affected by regulations. He even raised money for a group of kids to get a day on the water. But most of all, his appeal is his authenticity.
“Nobody on social media wants to admit failure,” he said. “But the most human thing ever is failure. And the only way I learn is by screwing stuff up. Royally.”
McFadden is 27, a first-generation crabber and the unlikely new face of a waterman’s culture that is centuries old and struggling to survive.
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The old guys, the pop-pops — like the generations before them — would put their sons on little boats, baptizing them with the brackish water of the Chesapeake Bay, setting their course for a lifetime on the water.
Not McFadden. He’s the biracial son of a psychiatrist and a stay-at-home mom whose stepfather is a pastor and whose first associations with seafood were on the pages of a black-and-white coffee table book at his grandma’s house. He couldn’t get enough of the grainy photos of old watermen and their crab and oyster boats.
“I wrote it in my fifth-grade yearbook,” he said. “I said I wanted to be a crabber.”
He’s now THE crabber. Thousands of fans communicate with him daily. He’s got T-shirts, mallets and beer koozies. He’s spent hours with lawyers hammering out sponsorship deals. (“And a lot of them ain’t worth it,” he said. “I’m learnin’ that I don’t wanna do a lot of that kinda stuff.”)
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There’s even a charter boat that takes TikTok fans out on the Chesapeake Bay alongside McFadden’s 30-foot fishing vessel, Southern Girl, so they can get their own live videos and photos of the charismatic — and usually slimy, grimy and sweaty — waterman.
“Someone came all the way from Colorado,” McFadden marveled, as he sold the last of a weekday catch on a roadside in Maryland this summer. All those fans, all that fame, and his living comes in by the bag. He lives off the wads of cash or Venmo payments from those willing to drive out to Glen Burnie or Pasadena and pay about $100 a dozen for the blue creatures.
The Maryland Watermen’s Association didn’t know a thing about him last year. Now? He’s going to be on the group’s billboard before the big national convention in January.
“Listen, what this young man is doing for our industry is a fabulous job,” said Robert T. Brown Sr., the president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, a 73-year-old man in a long line of crabbers who sees more and more watermen opt for desk jobs as it gets harder to make a living.
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I have to mention my bias here. My little brother is a crabber on the West Coast, and I am painfully familiar with the struggle of the industry, with how hard crabbers work — and live. And how important McFadden is to them.
This month, McFadden was one of the star guests at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s annual Watermen’s Appreciation Day.
“We’ve seen nothing like it,” said Kristen Greenaway, museum president. “The way he reaches out to a younger audience. His personality is able to convey that life of a waterman.”
Fans lined up for his autograph, for selfies and merch.
Whether or not you care about crabbing, boating, Maryland history, coolant systems or diesel mechanics, McFadden’s TikToks (he’s also on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube) are a delight to watch. He’s charming and self-deprecating, letting his audience get an appreciation for the high-wire, razor-thin margins of the fishing industry while being totally relatable in the way things go wrong for all of us.
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“Oh! There go some yard crabs,” he shouts, as feisty crabs trying to avoid the pot run from him and scamper across the grass in his instructional steaming episode.
There are the times he fouls his prop by tangling it in a line. “Did I learn my lesson?” he asks, dripping with harbor water after diving in to cut the tangle of rope. “No. Am I going to do it again? Yeah. Absolutely.”
There are management issues.
“I just got a call five minutes before he’s supposed to be at the boat that one of my guys isn’t feeling good today,” he says in the 4:34 a.m. darkness. “If you’re shorthanded it doesn’t mean you’re gonna work less. It just means it’s going to suck more.”
McFadden started out with an old eight-foot dingy he bought with $175 in lawnmowing money when he was 11. While his peers went to lacrosse clinics or robotics camps, McFadden rolled his boat to the shore, launched it after getting permission from the neighbors and drifted around the bayshore, pulling up crabs with chicken necks.
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Right out of high school, he became an apprentice crabber to an (only slightly) older crabber named CJ Canby. “So I was doing what I know now to be the worst jobs. … But I was just happy to do it.”
He knew college wasn’t for him, and he wants to be a champion for kids like him — the ones who could tear apart and put together an engine, who figure problems out with their heads and solve them with their hands.
He worked his way up to boat ownership. But he wasn’t entirely welcomed by the older, Whiter crabbing community.
His pots were messed with, and someone put racial slurs on one of his buoys. He shook it off and kept going — out the door at 4 a.m., shoving off before sunrise, pulling hundreds of pots, cleaning them, counting and sizing the crabs, then heading back.
The second shift is about selling the crabs. Every day, he posts on Facebook, describing what he’s got, how much they cost and where to pick them up. Text him your order, please.
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He mans the sales, usually done at 6 p.m. Then he usually heads back to the boat for more repairs and tinkering. When he gets home, it’s time to edit and post the next video.
His fiancée, Lindsey, helps with sales on Saturday, which is usually their biggest day. (“Please buy crabs on Monday,” he asks. “Otherwise, we don’t get paid during the week.”)
When they took a trip down the coast over the winter, Luke and Lindsey were greeted by fans from Maine to Key West, Fla.
“I couldn’t believe all the people who knew us,” he said. He calls Lindsey his “old lady.”
“Yeah, she’s got some of her own fans now, too,” he said, taking off his worn cap and scratching his head. “I don’t know how I’m going to deal with that.”
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