When Philip McMartin arrived in 1963, Annapolis was still a watermen’s town with workboats coming and going.     The 33-year-old journalist-photographer-filmmaker-sailor had fallen under the spell of the water, which drew him to Eastport, where he and his wife and four children lived a stone’s throw from Back Creek.     McMartin was fascinated by the rugged independence of life on the water. He carved images of Chesapeake watermen, skipjacks,...

If you’re nervous about numbers, the combination coming up this week could give you quite a scare. So portentous is this once-a-century triple 12 that it might — or might not — coincide with the end of the world.     Or was it 122112 when time stopped on the Mayan calendar?     Cross-cultural shaman Paul Sivert of The Shamanic Healing Institute in Savage, Maryland, puts a more positive slant on that coincidence of numbers.     ...

Autumn is forecast spectacular for the Thanksgiving weekend, opening one of the year’s last doors to get out into Chesapeake Country. One way to accept the invitation is to follow the December issue of SeaKayaker onto the treasure in our own backyard, the Patuxent Water Trail.     Ralph Heimlich, a member of the Chesapeake Paddlers Association, guides you into nature and history on the very accessible river.     The seven-page story, with maps and photos,...

The best appetizer is a good story. With that philosophy of life, I’m drooling over Bernard L. Herman’s first-person story of his ­Chesapeake Thanksgiving feast in this month’s Saveur.     A titled professor of American studies and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Herman tells his story with the loving detail we tend to reserve for faraway times.     Just before dawn on Thanksgiving morning, he begins, I pull on...