Hopes for blue-crab catch stir a sleepy spot in Md.

If you had time on your hands and faith that Sunday's gentle rain was not about to appreciably worsen, you may have been tempted to chance the back roads, heading home from Washington by stop-and-go slow boat, as it were, rather than up the blur of I-95.

One advantage of this route is that just off Main Street in Grasonville, Md., which is considered the Eastern Bay of the Chesapeake - across the bridge from Annapolis - you encounter Hunter's Crabs & Seafood Market.

It is rather dimly lit inside, a walk-in currently storing small, early-season blue crabs, and display cases featuring seafood on crushed ice, including resurgent steamer clams called snouts, pints of sweet picked crab, and olive-colored soft shells, filed upended to conserve shelf space.

But to get a measure of what the Chesapeake crab season (starting in earnest in a week or so) holds, you could do a lot worse: Jerry Hunter and his wife, Sandra, have been at this for a couple of decades, taking over from Jerry's father, Dick, who was recruited in the 1950s as a supplier by Philadelphia's Fred Green, king of the Blue Point empire that once dominated the crab trade in the city's Northeast.

"I think it's going to be a few crabs this year," Hunter will tell you, which is his way of acknowledging that things are looking up slightly after recent dismal harvests; looking up enough to start heading north soon with bushels for the city's bars and clubs.

One reason for the glimmer of optimism is stricter limits on when female crabs can be caught, and Virginia's ban, finally, on the self-defeating "dredge" fishery in which watermen scrape egg-filled crabs out of winter burrows.

By some counts, the bay's crab population could be up 40 percent this season, though at a total of 400 million that would still be half the numbers of the early 1990s.

So many threats still await the blue crab, not counting the bay's troubled water: You've got weekend crabbers, says Hunter. And skate fish that snap up the babies. And hungry rockfish, rebounding and on the hunt. "Everyone's after the crab," he says, "including us. It's like a gauntlet for them."

The ecology of the economy has added a new twist. As the oyster harvest has collapsed, more watermen have joined the chase for crabs. And those who'd docked their boats, taking up home-building during the boom, are headed to the water again with housing down in slump.

So it's a wonder that crabs are getting even the modest bounce that they're getting.

In a week or two - if the water warms up a few degrees - Hunter's will be trading the smaller Number Two's coming in from the marshy edges of the lower bay below Cambridge, Md., for the heftier, trademark blue crabs that are caught in the local Chester and Wye Rivers.

Then Jerry Hunter, like his father before him, will pack up his truck, heading for Philadelphia with his bushels. The old Blue Point Crab Houses are closed, and Eddie's, too, on Aramingo, mirroring, at the retail level, the wholesale plight of the bay's crabs.

But there's still Boncela's Cafe on Orthodox Street, and Byrne's Tavern in Port Richmond, the Polish-American Harmonia Club, and enough crab bars and clubs to make Hunter's trip worth his while.

He'll be taking the back way, forgoing I-95 for a ramble up rural U.S. Route 301, past the fledgling corn patches and asparagus fields and, in Church Hill, Md., Jeannie's ShoreGood Market, where the homemade crab soup alone is reason to take the slow road.

Hunter's Crabs

& Seafood Market