As a family of lifelong commercial fishers, we’ve always done our best to take care of the ocean off Virginia’s coast. But right now, an out-of-state company wants to dig out the foundation of our fishing grounds.

The federal government is considering a recent proposal by a Florida-based mining company to dredge Virginia’s seabed. If granted, our entire Eastern shore – 2,500 square miles – could be opened up to mining that would tear up the ocean bottom and crush the marine life that depends on it.

The two of us have saltwater running through our veins.

As for me – Jim – I fell in the water when I was two and have been driving a skiff since I was eight. My great uncle was a crabber, and my great aunt was picking crabs. I always knew I wanted to be a commercial fisherman here – just fell in love with fishing.

And as for me – Katie – my neighbor in Freeport, Long Island, threw me in the water and told me to swim when I was three. At about nine, I’d take the neighbors’ dog out on a paddle boat at six am to grab mussels off the pylons and stay out until dark. Neighbors would tell my parents they’d seen me.

Today, we are Virginia’s largest harvesters of black sea bass and flounder, fishing over 100 trips per season. Jim, the tech whiz with a chemistry degree, recently designed and built our own boat and fishes all day with our 24-year-old son, Matt. Katie takes care of lobsters in the tank and delivers our product every Saturday to people’s houses. Around Chincoteague, some people know us better as “Jimmy Neutron” and “The Lobsta Lady.”

We know the ocean like we know ourselves. It’s a deep connection like no other and we take great pride in selling fresh caught fish to our community. We bread it and fry it up in corn oil at fish fries for the Elks Club, and people can’t stop eating it – they don’t even bother with the side dishes.

These fishing grounds have supported fishermen like us for generations. Now it sounds like somebody wants to put them on the auction block. If the government wants to allow “suction dredging” off our coast, where a gigantic vacuum device would pull up massive amounts of sand, it could smother or suck up anything living on the seafloor.

Dredging the bottom could kick up clouds of metal-heavy sediment polluting our water and beaches. This could in turn interrupt fish feeding patterns, interfere with reproduction and spawning, and cause fish to move elsewhere. That not only affects the fish we catch but also would cause ripple effects on the whole food chain and ecosystem that help our fisheries thrive. In addition to the many corals growing on the seafloor, our waters are home to endangered whales, sea turtles, sturgeon and dolphins. They all depend on a healthy ocean bottom to make sure the rest of the water column stays clean, healthy and productive.

In Virginia, commercial fisheries bring in hundreds of millions of pounds of catch each year and generate over a billion dollars in economic activity. Any fisherman will tell you this business has gotten harder. We used to have 20 black sea bass fishermen out of Chincoteague. Today, we’re the only ones still out here. The COVID-19 pandemic really hurt us, and now diesel fuel is at $5 a gallon. We can’t afford to go out and search the way we used to.

And it’s not just economic pressure. The seas, the weather and the catch are changing our fisheries. Having fished these waters for over 40 years, we have decades of data and have observed temperature changes and the migration of species firsthand.

There just isn’t enough scientific knowledge yet about how mining will change things. Scientists have said it warrants follow up study. And the mining industry hasn’t bothered to reach out to those of us who steward these waters to communicate its plans or how they will affect all of us.

Before it makes a final decision, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is collecting public comments. Fishermen everywhere need to stand up and tell the federal government before August 22 that seabed mining would put our livelihoods and our way of life at risk. If you’re tearing up the bottom, you’re tearing up the future for fishermen like us.

Jim and Katie Dawson are commercial fishermen in Chincoteague, Virginia.