"There's a lot to do here!" one might say of Tangier — talking backwards.

Tangier has no shopping mall, no movie theater, no football field, no sports team. Just 66 students attend the island's only school, which teaches kindergarten through 12th grade. No alcohol is sold on the island.

Religion is the social glue, and members are fairly evenly split (hostilities occasionally flare) between Swain Memorial United Methodist Church and the newer New Testament nondenominational congregation. In the late '90s the town council rejected Hollywood's bid to come there to film the PG-13 romance "Message in a Bottle," starring Kevin Costner, because the script contained sex, cursing and alcohol.

For some, the smallness and quaintness of the island can be suffocating.

"Everything runs in a big circle here," said 32-year-old Brent Laird, as he painted the bottom of a boat down at the railway. "Ain't no pool hall, ain't no arcades, sure as hell ain't no bars. For a single man, there really ain't nothing to stay here for."

" I love that apart from the Good Lord Almighty, that I'm my own boss. I plant my feet on that work boat, and it's all mine. I get to do what I want, when I want and how I want . . . and that's hard to beat. " — Allen Parks, Tangier waterman

Nicknames abound on Tangier. There's Chowder, Seabiscuit, Monk, Hoot (who also goes by Frank, although his real name is George). Everyone knows the mayor, James Eskridge, as Ooker, after a sound he made chasing his rooster as a boy.

"Ooker" Eskridge, 55, is a tall, thin, ruggedly handsome waterman with copper hair under his red baseball cap. When he's not working on the island or crabbing on the water, Eskridge zips over to his crab shack on the Sree Devi — a motorboat named after one of his four adopted daughters — to feed the seagulls and his four cats. On the inside of his left forearm is a tattoo of an ichthus with "Jesus" written inside. On the right is a Star of David, to show his support for Israel and biblical literalism.

But Eskridge isn't here to talk religion, but rather the problems facing Tangier and its watermen.

First there's the license moratorium, started in 1999, to reverse the effects of overfishing in the bay. With no new licenses, it's tough for young people to enter the fishing business. There's also the increased cost of working on the water — higher prices for fuel, bait, crab pots and the zinc bars needed to prevent the pots from rusting. But the biggest blow, he said, is the crab sanctuary.

"You do need regulations, don't misunderstand me. And you need laws concerning the harvesting of crabs and fish and the oysters," he said. "But it seems like they took it too far. You can regulate people out of business."

In 2000, the VMRC instituted a crab sanctuary that runs every year from May 16 through Sept. 15 and covers the heart of Virginia's portion of the Chesapeake Bay. The region from Maryland just north of Tangier all the way down to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay is covered by the same dates, even though water temperature (which determines where crabs are) varies considerably.

When the crab season starts March 17, the crabs are only in the southern part of the bay. By the time they migrate north around Tangier, in mid- to late April or even early May, Eskridge said, there's not much time left before the sanctuary closes May 16.