Tangier Island Guide

Tangier sits twelve miles out in the middle of the Chesapeake, and there’s no bridge and no car ferry — you reach it by cruise boat from Crisfield or Reedville, a seasonal passenger ferry from Onancock, or the year-round mail boat, and then you walk or bike, because the lanes are too narrow for much else. It’s a working soft-shell crab town of a few hundred watermen and their families, ringed by crab shanties up on stilts, and it speaks in a brogue so old — a Cornwall-tinged echo of the 1700s English settlers — that outsiders sometimes need a beat to catch it. It’s also disappearing: the island has lost roughly two-thirds of its land since the mid-1800s, and scientists warn it could be uninhabitable within decades. Don’t be the one who treats it like a novelty photo stop; it’s someone’s whole world, and it’s going under.