CHESAPEAKE BAY

By Clayton Davis

My backyard is the Chesapeake Bay. It is the nation's largest estuary, a semi-enclosed basin with fresh water flowing in at the top end and mingling with salt water swelling up tidally from the Atlantic Ocean.

The word "Chesapeake" comes from the Algonquin Indian word "Chesepioc," which means "great shellfish bay." Shellfish have made the Chesapeake famous. Oysters and blue crabs are the most popular food from the Bay.

Captain John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay in the early 1600s. He wrote of seeing enough Striped Bass to

fill a 100-ton ship. I have seen big ones caught by a friend who invited me to go fishing.

There are three ways to visit the Chesapeake Bay, by road, by water, and by air. U.S. Highway 50 runs east and west from Washington, DC to the Atlantic Ocean. It crosses the Chesapeake Bay Bridge near Annapolis and the U.S. Naval Academy.

By water you arrive at the north end through the Delaware-Chesapeake Canal, an inland waterway navigable by deep-draft vessels. From the south you leave the Atlantic Ocean and cross a channel over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. You�ll sail past Norfolk, Virginia, home of the world�s largest aircraft carriers.

If you chose to drive across the Bridge-Tunnel it would be on U.S. Highway 13 that takes you to the Delmarva Peninsula, because it is part of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

By air you can arrive at Baltimore-Washington International Airport on the scheduled airlines or by private plane to Stevensville Airport at the eastern end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge alongside U.S. Highway 50.

You can water ski in the Chesapeake Bay. The jellyfish will love the taste of you. They sting. Scuba diving will show you an oily, muddy bottom and not much else.

Sail boating is practiced on the Chesapeake Bay with great enthusiasm the whole year round. Really large yachts mix with fast speedboats on the Bay. Everything afloat keeps an eye out for large ocean-going vessels.

Nearly all the marinas along both shores of the Chesapeake Bay will have boats that offer fishing trips. In my humble opinion the best way to go fishing is with a friend in his cabin cruiser. My friend�s magnificent boat was rescued for a few dollars and its Chrysler 318 cubic inch, V-8 engine rebuilt.

We had six Bucktails of various colors following in our wake as we trolled at 1000 rpm a mile north of Bloody Point.

"Bass on their way to spawn split up right about here," my friend told me. "Some break off and swim to the east. The rest continue northward."

They didn�t swim in schools that time of year. Each one goes its own independent way looking for its loving destiny in the friendly waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

In addition to trolling with six Bucktails we had rigged a "Dummy" line. That is a simple thing to do, just a line tied to a cleat. But it was loaded with something called an Alewife.

"This plastic Alewife with this great big hook." My friend grinned and held it up for my inspection. "Watch them want it first."

Pronounced "L-Y" this ten-inch replica looked exactly like it was escaping from those enormous swarms of Alewives that are netted for cat-food and fish oil.

"There she goes! See the line!" My friend motioned toward the dummy line that was no longer parallel to our wake, but looked like it was about to tow us up the Chesapeake Bay.

"Uh. Big one," my friend grunted as he hauled in the line hand-over-hand.

"Thirty-six inches," he reported. That beautiful Striped Bass lay on the deck alongside a yardstick measure inscribed there. Two others that measured twenty-eight and thirty inches were rapidly released after tasting our brightly colored Bucktails. Too short for keepers.

Suddenly my friend began to reel and pull. Something had severely bent one of the rods as we trolled a mile west of Kentmoor. He said the biggest fish are always caught right in this spot.

Handing me the rig, he instructed, "Here. Pull up like this. Then reel in the line as you lower the rod."

Seemed like we were in the grip of something prehistoric. Ten minutes I reeled and heaved. Every time some line was lovingly hauled in, whatever was down there made the brake scream as the fish reclaimed its right to own the Chesapeake Bay.

"No, never. Can't tighten the reel any more. Bust the line if we do. Getting tired? Fish winning?" My learned friend asked. His grin told me not to give up.

"Ah. There she is. Back her down into the net," he said at last. With his help we boarded one really big Striped Bass. Thirty-seven inches of good eating lay there on the deck.

Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs are world-famous and every backyard or cookout within seagull distance of the Bay seems to have a pot of steaming crabs in season. Beer is poured over them just before the lid closes. Some folks just have to take a small swig first. Nobody will mind very much.

Every Maryland citizen has a recipe for steaming crabs. You can't tell which recipe is being followed because beer drinkers serve as backyard chefs.

Catching crabs is easy. Go to your butcher and ask for some chicken necks. Tie a neck on a string. Sit on a pier. Dangle the neck in the water, down about three feet, so you can still see it. After a small swig of beer peek down the string. The chicken neck will be festooned with crabs. Six or eight will be clinging to it. Draw out the string, firmly, not quickly. Slip a net under your catch. As soon as the crabs begin to see daylight, back into the Bay they tumble.

The net is a local invention. Take a one-inch aluminum pole eight feet long. To the end affix a basketball-size hoop. Put some netting on the hoop. Let it dangle eighteen to twenty-four inches.

Great skill is required to haul in your chicken neck and slip the net beneath the crabs. Small children and teenagers with calm nerves do it best. Adults consume too much beer anticipating the feast to come at sundown.

Keeping crabs after they're caught is very easy. An apple basket works just fine. Crabs are like people with low morals. Let one begin getting ahead in its climb out of the basket and the rest grab on and hold it back. This phenomenon is observable amongst the residents in many of America's larger cities.

Space constraints prevent a fuller description of the entire Chesapeake Bay region. Here are a couple of my favorite day-trips.

To visit a lighthouse like they use on the Chesapeake Bay go to Saint Michaels, Maryland. Head west on Maryland Route 33 from U.S. Highway 50 at Easton, Maryland. That highway is the main thoroughfare from Washington, D.C. to the Atlantic beaches.

After driving the open-road speed limit for a few minutes, you are suddenly tiptoeing at fifteen miles an hour down a half-mile-long main street with two church steeples. This narrow street is lined with two-story houses that have big chimneys. Most were constructed in colonial times when the idea of central heating would have been considered future shock.

You turn right at Mill Street and find the Maritime Museum. The prominent feature at the museum is a lighthouse. It is the peculiar kind used on the Chesapeake Bay, set on stilts a good many yards from the shore.

Chesapeake Bay lighthouses are squat in appearances, not tall like those along ocean coasts. Coastal lighthouses are tall so they can be seen many miles out at sea. The Chesapeake Bay is 200 miles long and only four miles wide in some places, so you don't need really tall lighthouses here.

More than half a century ago Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, was a resort town with beachfront hotels, a race track, casino, bathhouses and beaches. A pier extended a mile into the Chesapeake Bay where steamers from Baltimore arrived daily during the summer months.

June 9, 1900 the first train from Washington, D.C. arrived at Chesapeake Beach, Maryland. It was a one-hour ride. And it fulfilled the dream of Otto Mears, a railroad builder from Colorado. He and a group of Denver investors started the Chesapeake Beach resort in the late 1890s.

Since 1868 the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company had been taking people from Washington, D.C. to Greenbrier, the world-famous mountain resort at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. With the opening of the Chesapeake Beach resort people in the nation's capital had a choice of going to the mountains or to the beach.

After WW I, all during the 1920s, people lived a joyous life. A trip to the beach, Chesapeake Beach, was what they felt was due and owing to them.

Automobiles eventually began to take passengers away from the Chesapeake Beach Railway. The final blow fell during the Great Depression. It was a sad day April 15, 1935 when the final train chugged away from the Chesapeake Beach station with its last passengers.

Today the railway station remains as a museum. Behind it stands a lonely passenger car on a short piece of track. There they sit on the edge of a parking lot at a marina and restaurant. It seems like they are still waiting for the next load of passengers from Washington, D.C.

Annapolis, Maryland is host to the U.S. Naval Academy and seems to be a small town from colonial times. Cobblestone streets still remember George Washington�s horse when he visited here. Lack of parking makes people wish horses were still available for transportation.

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