Celebrating Why We Live Here
By Meg Walburn Viviano
It’s mid-May, and as I write this, the temperature has shown little interest in climbing out of the 60s for the last week. Wind, rain, and even an astounding hailstorm pummeled my neighborhood for Mother’s Day weekend, so the flipflops and shorts I so gleefully tossed on a week or two ago went right back in the lonely part of my closet, where they spent the long pandemic winter.
I’m here to assure you: though it may not have felt like it lately, summer is on the way! Boaters are getting back on the water and rockfish season is well underway (ask our Sporting Life columnist, Dennis Doyle, how that’s going so far).
And as our cover story proclaims, summer camp season is looming large. If you’re a parent who took a wait-and-see approach amid all the uncertainty of the pandemic recovery this spring, things are looking up! And now is your last chance to make plans for camp.
With some school-aged children on the cusp of being eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, there’s more assurance than ever that camps this summer will be safe. Some have only recently firmed up their operating plans in recent months, offering many new options for families. Other camps have only limited numbers of slots left. As you’ll find inside these pages, the offerings are fabulously fun and wide-ranging. I will happily take a week off from editing CBM’s publications to try out marine biology, boat handling, archaeology, or ceramics.
Unfortunately, nobody is going to let me sneak away to nature camp or the horseback riding ring when there are weekly print deadlines to hit. And we’re even busier than usual here at CBM because we’re celebrating a milestone this month: Chesapeake Bay Magazine’s 50th anniversary!
First published in May 1971 by founders Dick and Dixie Goertemiller, the magazine was an influential guide to boating and cruising destinations—a way to stay in the know about Chesapeake Bay happenings and how to get to waterfront attractions long before there was Google or GPS. It evolved into a far-reaching regional magazine that tells the (often little-known) stories of the Bay, supporting its modern-day mission of “Celebrating Why We Live Here”.
The CBM team is proud to be the stewards of this wonderful tradition in Chesapeake Country, further expanding from a print-only magazine to Bay-focused digital news and video storytelling. And most recently, we added Bay Weekly, a newspaper with plenty of its own traditions that was already doing a great job of celebrating why we live here.
So cheers to 50 years of Chesapeake Bay Magazine, older sister of CBM Bay Weekly! Watch for some exciting collaborations between the two publications we have in the works as we move towards the next 50 years.