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A Sailor’s Log from the Chesapeake to the Gulf
Installment I: Preparation
by Adam Smith

“A little too ambitious,” I thought as I looked at the enormous pile of debris surrounding the Cal ‘29 on blocks. Perhaps the idea of creating a new boat from the hull up was naive, but we had tools and gumption and nothing to do for three months. And we had this boat. Actually Stowe Teti owns the boat; Darin Linebaugh, John Gill and I work on it. We have all either just graduated or are about to graduate from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and we all have varying degrees of sailing experience. The prospect of rebuilding a perfectly nice cruising sloop into a stark white, function-over-form, racing boat was intriguing and crazy and seemed to be something on which to build character. We were right.

The project was born before most of this crew started kindergarten, in the July heat of 1975, as a blue and off-white 29 foot sloop, laid-up by hand. It’s still a sound hull and tells few stories. One, however, came with the boat.

During a summer storm on the Eastern Shore, she settled a little too forcefully on the top of a piling. An occupant in the head at the time of the puncture might have been surprised to find a large vertical log paying a brief visit to the forward thru-hull fitting.

An Eastern-Shore yard won the nasty task of cutting a three-foot by three-foot section out and replacing nine layers of roving with alternating cloth. When we inspected the boat, we found little evidence of the repair besides the subtle change of pitch with a knuckle rap against the re-roved port side.

Stowe purchased the vessel in November 1991, updated it, repainted it a sort of midnight blue and renamed it Stoweaway.
We delivered her to St. Marys in one long day with a Northwest Chesapeake stiff breeze. It was cold and rained from sun-up until we fell exhausted in our dormitory beds at 0300. She sailed well under a genoa and single-reefed main.

Overpowered? Yes, but we wanted to prove her worth in the most dangerous of seas. We also wanted to go as fast as possible in this somewhat heavy cruising-class sailboat. And we went fast: from Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Facility to the ominous gas off-loading and distribution dock north of Point Lookout, we averaged 8.2 knots.

Sailing almost every weekend on Stoweaway, which Stowe left moored just off the college waterfront, we learned how to sail together. When he went back home to Carmel for the summer, I watched Stoweaway for him. When the 1992 fall semester started, we hatched a plan to sail her to California the following summer. In dry storage in March, we began to dismantle her from the inside out; replacing bulkhead, portals, and floor-pans. California was shortened to Corpus Christi, Texas via the Florida Keys, avoiding the Intercoastal Ditch. Summer 1993 was postponed to fall.

Fall arrived, and with the addition of Darin and John, construction resumed with renewed vigor. We began by replacing the main bulkheads with 1/2 inch laminated plywood, yielding a combined thickness of three inches. The ceiling was tongue and groove fir-coated in West System epoxy and finished with two-part varnish, a far cry from the original off-white non-skid. Working forward, we began construction on the galley—an amidships arrangement centered on the new five-by-seven mahogany mast compression post. The cabin-top support beams were one-inch by five-inch mahogany headbangers (John and Darin are both over six feet tall while Stowe and I are in the five-foot-ten range).

Just this week we have installed the engine-to-gearbox mounting plates and the new packing cord to prevent leaking. John has placed hinged quarter-berth panels on the engine compartment and has installed the engine-box as well. His dogged determination and conservative disposition keep us all from running into problems, though his happy-go-lucky attitude may be the result of an overdose of cuprous oxide; he sanded the entire bottom and repainted with Regatta Baltoplate. John will be the navigator.

Darin has installed the anchor roller and has restrung the bow-lights. Recently he has stripped and repainted the mast and boom, mounting new bails for the space-saving cabin-top mounted traveler. Darin has placed the new winches on the comings in the cockpit—a pair of used two-speed Barlows will drag the genoa in nicely. The centerpiece (actually it sits to port on the cabin-top, aft of the traveler) is the self-tailing, two-speed Lewmar 30 mounted winch for hauling the mainsheet, hoisting the rope halyards and occasionally ungrounding from Chesapeake super-goo. Darin has proven invaluable for reminding us that this is a vacation. He will be first mate.

Stowe tries to redirect all our misguided fumblings. Though we harass him, we recognize that he has read and retained a tremendous amount of material. His custom woodworking experience has awarded us a mahogany table, galley counter, navigator’s table and electrical box. The rest of the boat, to add emphasis to the massive wooden accouterments, is stark white. It is so white that when you open the cabin door you expect a light to come on, exposing wire racks and a thermostat. Stowe has built and installed davits for the dinghy and is wiring the boat this week. Stowe will be our captain.

I am in charge of making the engine run the way it should (the bane of owing metric tools, I suppose) and cooking on the trip. I can also sail pretty well but all the experience I have is in dinghy sailing and square riggers. I look forward to testing ancient, nautical recipes on the guys.

After a series of frustrating setbacks, we are nearly ready. This week will see the launching, mast raising and engine aligning party all in one day. We plan to sail the second week of November (God willing) with a shakedown up the Bay through the C&D Canal.

Adam Smith worked for two years as a second mate and historic interpreter of the Dove, the St. Marys-berthed replica of the Lord Baltimore’s expeditionary vessel.

Greening of Annapolis?
Most of us realize we’re beyond the day when we can afford to keep poisoning and plundering the earth. But as we struggle to pay bills and keep up with so many demands, we sometimes forget how doing small things can help our wallets as well as our world.

That’s why a project like Green Gardens—sponsored by the Alliance for Community Education— is so valuable in reminding us what to do.

What is Green Gardens? It’s a common-sense approach to living that goes well beyond the garden. It recommends:

• Cutting out pesticides and cutting down on fertilizers;
  
• Composting food scraps and yard waste;
  
• Growing organic vegetables and fruits;
  
• Planting native plants;
  
• Using rainwater for gardens;
  
• Planting trees and building arbors to make energy-saving shade.

The Annapolis-based Alliance for Community Education is moving swiftly to spread its ideas with slide shows and to apply Green Gardens as part of the curriculum at Anne Arundel Community College. As the plan goes, students could set up an alternative lawn and garden service.

Green Gardens is the brainchild of Ann Pearson, 62, of Annapolis, who founded the Alliance last May based on what she has learned in a varied life that has included working in the theater and running an inn.

Back in the ‘70s, Pearson grew weary of what she describes as the suburban commercial culture. So she packed up her son and daughter, then 16 and 13, and moved to a log cabin in the Maine woods.

There they lived primitively, packing in supplies and growing much of what they ate. The teens were schooled at home until college.

“It really transformed our lives,” she recalled.

Now, Ann Pearson is trying to turn attitudes along the Bay toward sustainable living.

“The concept underlying what we do is that sound environmental principles also are sound economic principles that can have social impact,” she said.

Cultural Outposts
With a resounding “Welcome,” postal customers and staff in Deale and neighboring communities ushered in Pat Pruitt as their new postmistress. From 1:30 to 3pm, Deale Post Office's back office, ordinarily closed to customers, was opened up and spruced up with seasonal decorations, seating, hors d’oeuvres, punch and cake.

Pat, who lives in Rose Haven, has been keeping communications flowing for eight years in Southern Maryland communities, where the PO is a cultural center. As postmistress in West River (AA County) and Cheltenham (PG County) she’s put her patrons first by keeping herself readily available to them, offering quick, personal responses to their questions and requests and expediting the mail.

Installations are serious. Like weddings, they need witnesses. In such ceremonies, everybody assures everybody else that society is civilized and efficient. Bill Minor, who manages post office operations for part of the 207 area, introduced Pruitt, praised her “outstanding performance” and swore her in. Gene Calvert, of Anne Arundel County’s Department of Human Resources, offered his assistance for the future. Postal staff from other South County post offices showed Pat’s professional community’s support. Postal customers stopped by, as if to say keep up the good work, keep our mail moving.

Pat Pruitt, bringing communities together throughout South County for eight years, is now postmistress in Deale. It’s official.

— Liz Zyltiwis

Animal Attacks: “Dark Minds” At Work
Spooky, unexplained crimes are the worst, and crimes by sick people the most frightening. The string of shocking horse mutilations in Maryland has all of these features.

Since June, seven cases of brutal and seemingly ritualistic horse abuse have been reported in four counties. The most recent happened near Mitchellville in Prince George’s County in mid-October when a stallion’s genitals were cut as it grazed in a field.

The 12 year-old animal, named Revere Paul, had to be put to death from a neck injury that occurred when he tried to break loose from a rope drawn tightly by the attacker.

This was the first stallion after a string of mares. All of the cases have the common thread of bizarre attacks with knives in the same region of the animals’ bodies. The crimes have produced high anxiety, to say the least, among the horse crowd in Maryland.

“Most of us are a combination of outraged and frightened,” said Mary Johnston, of Woodstock, the owner of three horses bred for dressage—complex maneuvers resembling gymnastics for horses.

Deri Jeffers, a highly respected American Show Horse Association dressage judge, said that people are deploying extra caution.

“We’re totally appalled. This is just crazy and absurd,” said Jeffers, of the Eastern Shore. She observed that horses are very trusting of humans, which makes the crimes sadder yet.

Tfc. Gary Bachtell of the Maryland state police, who is coordinating the investigation, said that he is consulting police nationally and internationally for leads.

He said that the attacks in Maryland all do not fit the same mold and that police have not ruled out the possibility of cult involvement. Bachtell said that police had not assembled a profile of the attacker.

Others have.

Those who know horses are certain that it’s a man because of the strength needed to restrain big animals. They think it must be someone who knows horses, perhaps someone vengeful toward the elite world of horse owners.

“This is not just a bunch of kids who decided to pick on a poor horse,” said Johnston. “My image of the attacker is of a man who has some great dark spot in his mind about horses and horse people.”

Kathy Schwartz, operator of the Days End Farm Horse Rescue in Mount Airy, believes that the attacks are carried out by more than one person. She recalled that one of the mares was a previously abused and extremely shy animal unlikely to stand still under normal circumstances.

History and trends suggest forces at work beyond Maryland and beyond Virginia, where attacks on nine mares occurred three years ago.

Animal mutilations occur distressingly often, and some experts attribute them to satanic worship. In England alone, more than two dozen mares were attacked in the past two years. Among them were three animals owned by musician Davy Jones, a member of the Monkees—the 1960s’ singing group.

In the U.S., the mutilations happen most frequently in the West. On Sept. 28, two horse heads were found on a street in suburban Phoenix. Three days later, a passer-by discovered 23 bird corpses with body parts missing.

Two years ago in Arizona, after eight cattle and a horse were attacked, authorities said flatly that it was the work of Satan-worshippers.

One of the strangest cases occurred at the Denver Zoo last year, when an Australian black swan was slit with surgical precision. A year before, precisely to the day, another black swan was killed at the zoo in the same gruesome fashion.

Dogs, cats, goats, roosters, chickens and doves—all have turned up mutilated around the country in recent years. Many times, stumped authorities have attributed the crimes to supersecret cults performing rituals of sacrifice, perhaps during an underground holidays.

Who knows what evil lurks.

Back in Maryland, a reward has been set up to help track down the attackers. Horse owners sleep fitfully with the mystery unsolved. Horses that once were turned out nights are locked in the barn with dogs that used to sleep in the house.

“People are being very careful,” observed Deri Jeffers.

Mysteries like this belong in a Dick Francis novel, not in real life.

(Donations can be sent to: Star Reward Fund. c/o Days End Farm. P.O. Box 157/Fund. West Friendship. MD 21794.)

Way Downstream...
In California, the fire that devoured ritzy homes in Laguna Canyon may have been deadly to threatened wildlife. Fires can revitalize habitat by creating soil nutrients. But in this case, the canyon is home to many of the last of 300 or so gnatcatchers, tiny songbirds facing extinction ...

Nearly three years after the shooting stopped, Kuwait’s environmental toll from the Gulf War has become disturbingly clear. Geologists meeting last week in Boston reported at least 240 oil lakes in Kuwait from spilled oil caused by fires and bombing.

Thousands of flamingoes in Kuwait have mysteriously changed colors—from brilliant pink to dull white. Why? Flamingoes get their color from shrimp, and now many of the shrimp are dead from pollution...

Some of America’s worst public relations happens at sea. Remember the infamous garbage barges and Khian Sea waste ship prowling the globe in the 80s, looking for dumping grounds? Poor countries don’t like this because they don’t have the technology and plastic-lined dumps to handle toxics.

Now, the famous luxury liner, United States is reported by Greenpeace to be headed toward the Ukraine after being turned away from Turkey. United States, homeported in New York, needs a place to unload all the asbestos being stripped from her interior.

As far as PR, the ship couldn’t have a worse name ...

How about some good news on the technology front? AeroVironment Inc., an aerospace company in California, is building a solar-powered platform to study the environment from space. The 100 foot-long, unmanned vehicle, which looks like a giant wing, will carry sensors to monitor pollution, track storms and spot forest fires...

This week’s Creature Feature is a twinbill. Some of those geologists meeting up in Boston concluded that dinosaurs didn’t die from asteroids. Rather, they believe that dinosaurs succumbed to a lack of oxygen caused by volcanic eruptions.

Meanwhile, discoveries in Hong Kong show how people are stuck in the past. An environmental group called the Environmental Investigation Agency says at least half of 90 medicine shops still sell rhinoceros horns despite laws that prevent it.

Horns of the endangered rhinos are valued for what people believe is their aphrodisiac power.

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Hey Klan: We’re Watching You
Something ugly occurred recently in Southern Anne Arundel County. Something I’d rather not think about. Something I’d rather not remember. It haunts me like a dream, and perhaps I am not alone. Perhaps there are others who would rather not know, who would rather not remember. Worse still, perhaps some aren’t bothered at all.

A couple weeks ago, on a bizarre October night full of contradictions, off a small road along the Bay, the Ku Klux Klan held a recruitment “rally.” As one of the Klan organizers obsserved, “not too many people know about us down here, so we thought we’d come show them what we’re about.”

Thank you, but I think we already know what you’re about.

You’re all too familiar. You’re in the news every day, from places like the former Yugoslavia or South Africa. You’re in the history books, played out in the rise of Adolf Hitler.

You’re about hate. A commodity that’s never in short supply and is never less than ugly.

When I read that the Klan was bringing their hateful message so close to home, I was outraged and sickened.

Granted, our constitution guarantees you the right to gather, to speak and to protest in the name of your krooked cause. Still, no law could make it good.

As a journalist, I could not ignore this, as I’m sure most people of good will did. Nor could I stand and join the throng of several hundred candle-holders, although my heart was with them as they silently protested a few blocks from the site of the “rally.”

No, I had to know the nature of the beast, to look it in the face and hear its hate-filled words.

The neighborhood was unnaturally quiet despite the flow of passing cars filled with people swiveling their necks for a glimpse of ... who knew what. Everywhere, police stood in clusters or sat in their squad cars, alert for the first sign of violence. Though they reported no outbreaks, the feel of palpable violence floated through the air.

Standing in a small group along the sidewalk, Klan organizers asked, “are you here for the rally?” They wore combat fatigues and jackets—no white robes. I nodded my head and the man reached to an extension cord suspended in the air and flipped a switch illuminating the wooded pathway.

The whole thing felt like something from the Puritan stories of the moon-lit gatherings of witches and devil-worshippers. As I negotiated the twisted roots and broken, rotting pallets that laced the trail, I kept expecting that old cloven-footed sooty fellow to jump from behind some tree and offer me God-only-knows what.

Finally I stumbled into a clearing filled with about 50 people, among them a few wearing white, hooded robes. There were no blazing bonfires; no people dancing naked under the moon. The only devil these people worshipped was hate, and it hung thick in the air like the scent of skunk. Yet speakers made regular references to Christianity, God and Jesus. An application for membership, handed to listeners at the rally, promotes the Klan in the name of Christianity.

For anyone who might believe that, and has nevertheless read this far, the teachings of Christ, stress peace and love.

The Klan and other groups of their ilk know nothing of these things. They cower under hoods and darkness, waiting to catch us off guard. They are the proverbial wolf in sheep’s wool, and we must not fall prey to their tricks.

Who are these hate-mongers?

Aside from members of a local motorcycle gang, whose clubhouse was the site of the “rally” and who “have nothing to say,” the entire event was organized by people from counties distant from the Bay. Some were from Frederick County, others from Cecil.

Still, locals showed up. Some were curious. Others interested. People came and went at too steady a clip. Young and old, men and women. All white. Our neighbors, perhaps. Maybe our children. Some even spoke to the crowd, trying to stoke the hate in their own community.

But down the road a much greater show of numbers—hundreds of silent, candle-holding protesters, made up of young and old, men and women, blacks and whites—refused to let the hate fester unchecked.

Similarly, we must all take a stand.

Here along the Bay, prejudice still abounds, but we have learned to live together more or less in peace. The local histories of blacks and whites are entwined together, and perhaps this shared history has increased our tolerance.

There are exceptions, of course. For instance, according to the independent Klan monitoring group Klanwatch, there’s a Klan chapter right in Edgewater. But on a large scale the Klan has not appealed to Baysiders. Most people here have long since rejected the hate and violence the Klan represents.

Yes, we know what you’re about, and we urge everyone to take a stand. Prejudices and differences aside, let’s not give these people an excuse to come back. Don’t fall for hate.

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Happily Puzzled

Dear New Bay Times:
I look forward eagerly each week to your excellent paper for a variety of reasons, one of which is the cleverness of your word puzzles. As a lifelong puzzle fan, I find those with cryptic clues as well as dictionary definitions to be especially challenging and satisfying.

They are far more diverting than the excessively easy ones in the Washington Post and are easily worth the cost of my subscription. Please keep them coming and don’t be tempted to make them any simpler or easier.

The harder, the better.

— E.B. Smith, Fairhaven Cliffs Md.

NAFTA Backers Speak Out

Dear New Bay Times:
Your editorial opposing NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement) is not well thought out. Of course environmental protection and labor laws in Mexico are not up to U.S. standards. But then neither are those of China, Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand, where low-skill jobs are headed without NAFTA. Unfortunately, those countries buy their high-tech parts, machine tools, product design and research-and-development from Japan, not from the U.S., as Mexico and Latin America do.

Today, economic developing in Mexico is artificially crammed into narrow strips opposite U.S. border towns. Workers from the interior of Mexico are displaced to this border and find it easy to make the last few steps into the U.S. after learning basic skills and saving a little cash in the maquiladoras.

Your newspaper knows all about the consequences of too much development in too small a space along the Chesapeake. It is no wonder that the Mexican border is falling behind on basic infrastructure. We do not believe our society has “progressed” to the point where we will build a Great Wall of North America and shoot them as they try to cross. We have no choice but to encourage economic development in our neighbors to the South. NAFTA will do just that.

All the Mexican horror stories cited by treaty opponents took place without NAFTA. Establishing commissions, rules and guidelines will bring these issues into the sunshine easier and sooner than happens today. No, it is not a panacea. Mexico will not get the AFL-CIO Award of Merit or the League of Conservation Voters Country of the Year Award if NAFTA passes. But it would come closer to these labor and environmental goals than it does today or will tomorrow without NAFTA.

We must admit that some supporters damn the thing with faint praise by treating it like a good dose of cod liver oil that will help us in the “long run.” Horse manure.

In today’s lightning-fast economy, we will spot the long run on a watch, not a calendar. The signal we send to Mexico, Latin America and the rest of the developing world that we care and are willing to let trade, not aid, guide their development is in our best interest now as well as later.

— Jim Caldwell and Jan McFarland, Fairhaven, Md.

Editor’s note: Good points. If things move so quickly, why not fast-forward to NAFTA II, and get an agreement that does more to help displaced U.S. workers and has a bigger hammer to force Mexico to curb its human rights abuses?

Faraway Fans

Dear New Bay Times:
Greetings! While on our R&R this August, Kim and Wayne Langford, and Kathy Gramp and Scott Smith gave us copies of your newspaper. After reading the August issues several times, we were so homesick.

So, we decided to subscribe to New Bay Times to fill us in on “hometown” news.

— Margaret Knight, U.S. Embassy, Bucharest, Romania

From Lusby to Dover, Read All Over

Dear New Bay Times:
We have a summer home in Lusby, Md., and really enjoy this paper. Thanks.

Please send us a two-year subscription.

Ken and Vonnie Zeigler, Dover, Penn.

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Practice Earth Control
by Kevin Mackessy

Protecting the environment takes more than slogans and banners. It takes action! We can’t continue to throw everything away and expect that someone in the future will clean our mess. We need to practice Earth Control. How? Simple: reduce, reuse, recycle and react. Cutting down on trash starts at home.

Reduce Waste
Become a selective shopper. Try to avoid products with excess packaging. packaging makes up approximately one-third of the average household’s garbage and accounts for 13 percent of the price you pay for food. Buy in bulk where possible. Buy refillable items like razors and pens. Try to buy products made from or packaged with recycled material. Choose materials that are convenient for you to recycle. Reducing waste saves resources, energy, landfill space and money.

Buy Reusable Products
Glass jars can be used for many things at home. Glass is also easily recycled. Repair, resell or donate your used items whenever you can. Have a yard sale. Call a charity; many will pick up items from your home. Try renting items you use infrequently. You’ll save money and your garage—and our landfills—won’t be filled with unwanted items. Be concerned. Avoid products harmful to your health or environment.

Recycle All That You Can
Twenty to fifty percent of what we throw away is recyclable. Drop-off centers abound; curbside pick-up is spreading throughout the state. If you’re like most of us, you get tons of junk mail. Please don’t throw it away. More than 40 percent of the waste material in our landfills is paper. Reuse yours. Blank backs can be cut, even glued, into scratch pads. After you’ve reused your paper, save it up in brown paper grocery bags for recycling. Mixed paper, which is refused at most recycling centers, is accepted at Aid to Retarded Citizens’ center on Spa Road in Annapolis.

Recycling your grass clippings and other yard wastes through composting helps reduce your contributions to our landfills. Using a mulching mower also helps. Many models are now available, including nonpolluting electric mowers. Composting is a natural and safe way to convert yard and vegetable waste into rich organic humus. Humus can then be used on your garden to improve the soil and help retain water. When you feed your soil, it’s less likely to need chemicals—which almost always have harmful side-effects. Don’t have room to compost? Many counties and towns run large-scale composting facilities and supply you with stickers to label your organic wastes so they can be added to the pile. Either way, you’ll reduce the trash you discard another 15 to 20 percent.

Get Involved
Write to manufacturers of over-packaged, non-recyclable or environmentally harmful products. Contact your state, county and local representatives about your environmental concerns. Support your community recycling effort. Ask for recycled paper when you buy paper or printing services.

My family of four recycles and reuses virtually everything. We throw away only one 30-gallon container every two weeks. You too can make a difference. Give your trash a second chance. Please practice earth control.

Kevin Mackessy of Columbia writes on Southeast Asian affairs as well as environmentally sound living.

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Fata Morgana
by Bruce Bauer

If you go by way of Morgan le Fay, it’s not so long a way as you might think from the Chesapeake Bay to King Arthur’s Camelot court.

Morgan le Fay was one of King Arthur’s less affectionate sisters—in fact, a formidable adversary, for she was a bad-seed student of the wizard Merlin. Morgan became an accomplished sorceress. Her great potency was unhampered by social conscience. Three times she plotted to kill her king-brother, perhaps motivated by his overbearing goody-goodness and maddening forgiveness toward everybody—including herself. He was, however, wise enough to be cautious when his mean little sister was in town—up from Calabria in southern Italy where she reportedly lived in a castle nestled at the bottom of a deep lake.

Morgan la Fay’s bad reputation is summed up in her name. “Fata”—from the Latin fatalis,—means fatal, deadly or destiny. In Italian, it means fairy, elf or deeds done by such spirits. In English, Morgan la Fay translates to Morgan the Sorceress or Witch.

You’ll hear her name and see her power right here on our Chesapeake Bay, where she makes mirages appear.

Relating the elegant evil lady to a mirage was probably the work of superstitious fishermen in the Straits of Messina, between the island of Sicily and the top of the toe of the Italian boot. Calabria, there on the mainland where Morgan lives, is a moody land with brooding mountains.

Some days, the fishermen working in the Straits saw strange distortions of the land. To navigate to good fishing spots, they had studied the features of the coast; some days seemingly familiar features were weirdly aberrant. The fishermen thought they were seeing spells cast by Morgana from her underwater castle, so they named the spectacle “Fata Morgana” in her honor.

On windless autumn days, Morgan’s spells appear on the Chesapeake. The Eastern Shore seen from Herring Bay—a distance of nine or ten miles—is usually a thin and discontinuous line formed by the very top of the trees. But on Morgana’s days, the shore looks bold, thickened and magnified. Nearer islands—such as Coach’s, south of Poplar—seem elevated and notched on the ends like arrow nocks.

Ships coming up the Bay in the channel are grotesquely stretched in the vertical so that they appear to be towering above the horizon. (“Towering,” in fact, is another name for the illusion.) Through binoculars, the image can be seen to be composed of the regular imaged topped by an inverted mirror image. Colors are startlingly intensified. The atmosphere near the surface of the earth seems to shimmer like heat waves rising from a hot highway. But the day is not hot; it is autumn and the sky is clear and the air crisp.

If not Morgan le Fay, what is producing these illusions?

The key condition is a sharp and significant difference in temperature between warm water and cold air. There must be no wind. Then air warmed by contact with the water surface bulges up against the cold air layer, forming a lens that refracts some of the light rays reaching the eye from the distant shore. Other rays from the same objects pass under the lens unrefracted in warmer air. Think of the lens as an inverted glass saucer looked through edgewise.

I saw my first Fata Morgana from the bridge of the destroyer USS Ingraham (DD 694), approaching the Straits of Messina. The Ingraham was my first ship since as I had been commissioned as an ensign. There the mountainous coast makes the illusion much more dramatic than on a low shoreline. I had been reading, during a dull watch, the instructions for keeping the ship’s deck log. They included a long list of phenomena which should be mentioned if seen. Fata Morgana was included but not defined. I looked up the term in Bowditch.

On the very next watch, I was amazed to see great mountains shimmering upside down in the distant early morning sky. I duly (and smugly) logged in the sighting, trying to make my handwriting clearer than usual. Later the executive officer, who reviewed the logs, called me in his cabin to ask—facetiously, I hoped—“Who is this Fats Morgan you logged in off Messina?”

Three images may appear during severe refraction conditions—a lower one right side up, an inverted image on top of it, and a third on top, right side up, high in the air. That’s what Bowditch says, but I’ve never seen it.

If you do when you’re gazing off at the Eastern Shore one day, please photograph it and let me know.

Bruce Bauer is a retired Navy destroyer commander and a captain in the Merchant Marine.

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Who Needs the Bombers? We’ve Got the Bay
Ah, come on. Do you really, really care whether Baltimore gets a football team?

And, no, this question is not suggesting that we’re switching to a sports column; it’s just a matter of priorities. We’ll get back to a more appropriate subject—fishing—a bit farther on, but first let’s clear the air on a few things associated with all the hullabaloo: the moaning and the groaning about how the Baltimore Bombers bombed.

It was about at the same time the National Football League decreed a nearly month-long extension on deciding on Baltimore’s bid to house the Bombers that the Department of Natural Resources granted an extension of its own. It stretched the recreational rockfish season by two weeks, pushing back the close from Nov. 7 to 21.

Curiously, the biggest participation sport in Maryland didn’t get much timely media coverage on this. Newspaper space and precious radio and TV minutes were diverted to the post-mortems of Baltimore’s apparently losing bid to once again field an NFL team. You’d have thought the skies were falling not only on Chicken Little but also on all the football fans between Philadelphia and Washington.

A Chesapeake Bay oil spill the likes of Exxon’s Valdez disaster would have been back page news in the press—a 10-second blip on the electronic media. How could the NFL’s sanctimonious brethren even force Gov. William Donald Schaefer, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, Herb Belgrad, Boogie Weinglass, Malcolm Glazer, and all those many thousands of football fans (who didn’t support the Colts when they had them) to wait nearly another month before learning whether the Bombers would have a landing strip in Baltimore?

So Charlotte got one of the teams. So what? So, the delay probably means Baltimore won’t get the remaining slot. So what? Philadelphia and Washington aren’t such long drives for the fan who prefers being in a stadium to taking in the action couch-potato style.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against football; it’s one of the few things I watch on the tube. I played it in high school and on scrub teams at Goddard College; some of my favorite fishing companions were Weeb Ewbank, Eddie Block, Charlie Winner, John Unitas, Billy Ray Smith, Freddie Miller and so on. But aren’t we carrying all of this too far?

Don’t you—as do I—get the impression that the media and a large (excessively large) segment of the general public consider the most important contemporary issue is whether the quarterback for the Baltimore Bombers gets to toss the bomb half a length of a football field in Baltimore, which isn’t far from the Martin Co. that produced the B-26 Bomber?

Never mind that Martin’s B-26 wasn’t that much of a decisive factor in World War II—the B-24s and B-27s were the effective workhorses. The Ravens would have been a better moniker. Not only are they associated with Edgar Allan Poe’s best known literary effort, they’re also an exceptionally smart and enduring bird. Even the suggested Rhinos would have been more appropriate. Bombers!!!

But forget about names, even forget about the media overlooking the extension of the rockfish season—which incidentally will affect enough anglers to fill a football stadium. But don’t forget for a minute the more deep-rooted implications of contemporary priorities.

The Chesapeake Bay is in more trouble than Baltimore without a football team. The Bay contributes more to Maryland’s economy than a football team—never mind its recreational opportunities. More than a million people fish the Chesapeake in the course of a year; hundreds of thousands crab in it; countless others sail, boat, waterski or whatever in it. Millions of dollars are made—or at least were—by its commercial fishermen.

And don’t give me that old line about the role the Bombers would play in publicizing Maryland across the nation. Go to, say, Salt Lake City, and announce your Maryland origin. Would they ask you about the Bombers?

If you know the answer it isn’t a question. They’d ask you about the salty Chesapeake Bay oyster. Go to Kalamazoo; they’d ask you about the Maryland blue crab. Boston, they’d ask about the Chesapeake Bay shad.

Yet, when it came to the anticipated closing hours of NFL deliberations in Rosemont, Ill. (where’s that?), there were Gov. Schaefer and his crew, presumably at state expense, pacing the floor like will-be daddies outside a delivery room.

If only the Chesapeake … well not only the Chesapeake, but all of Maryland’s natural resources could get that kind of attention, effort and financial considerations. Our efforts on behalf of our resources are bush league by comparison. Are not our priorities skewered?

Again, if you know the answer …

Interest from bond issues to finance a football stadium construction—as with the Orioles’ home diamond—would operate the entire state parks system annually. Yet we have early closings and late openings of state parks because of lack of funding. We have state parks operated partially by volunteers because there’s no money to pay salaries to full-timers.

Hey, ask a left tackle, never mind a star quarterback, to donate a Sunday’s pay to help finance a stadium! You can’t even get a free autograph from a sports luminary at a card signing these days. With some, the going price is $8—in the range of a Chesapeake Bay fishing license with a rockfish permit to boot.

And when we build a stadium, who are we doing it for? We’re doing it for an owner whose prime consideration—forget all the hometown hoopla—is to make money. When the team loses, as all teams do at some time or other—and so-called loyal fans stay home, that owner’s team is history. The Baltimore Bombers could be the Chepachet, R.I. Bombers.

Remember, Bob Irsay was only one of several who did it, and I’ve no argument with that. It was his money; he owned the team. The fans chose not to support him, so why should he support them?

Remember, too, that we don’t have to worry about someone moving the Chesapeake Bay, or, say, Rocky Gap State Park, which brings up another sore point in the neglect of our recreational and natural resources.

Today, the dollar is almighty. So at Rocky Gap, Gov. Schaefer—always on the alert for reaping financial harvests for Maryland—has successfully pushed for constructing a professional golf course, ala Jack Nicholas. Do we—who find healthy and stimulating recreational pursuits at state parks—think for a minute that a place like Rocky Gap will continue to be a campers’, boaters’, fishermen’s, hikers’ paradise once hordes of golfers parade to the tees?

Golf will bring in the money, the publicity, and a grand park in Allegheny County will become just another money-making tourist trap. The original concept of the park will be secondary. Forgotten. What park, what project will be next?

What funds will be next. The governor and the General Assembly continually search out ways to dip into Open Spaces and other dedicated funds to relieve us of moneys originally destined to benefit the outdoors oriented. It’s a constant chipping away of our due.

Talk about the community or statewide “dribble down” financial benefits of a major sports team all you want, but what about the same with those who hunt, fish, camp, hike, birdwatch, picnic? They spend money, too. Lots of it. A couple decades back, a national campers association encouraged campers to use silver dollars as currency on their jaunts to enlighten local businesses about their economic impact.

It worked. Maybe we should consider that.

Maybe, no, certainly, the powers that be should be cognizant there are healthy, wholesome—and economic benefits—beyond stadiums and multi-million-dollar athletes and owners who wouldn’t know an oil spill from a martini polluted with too much vermouth.

Think I’m upset? I am. Money will not buy the pleasures I—and probably you, too—get from our natural resources. What we learn and what we do in our outdoor pursuits are important aspects of our lives, even our well-being. Humans must have affordable, wholesome, healthy and soul-cleansing relief from today’s madness of today if society is to endure.

Many paragraphs back was the news the recreational season for rockfish has been extended, even though as far back as last spring DNR and the Striped Bass Advisory Board warned the regulations would be set in stone. The change was called for: recreational fishermen, because of rockfish migratory patterns, water temperatures and too many windy days, caught only half of what was anticipated. Give them a chance to catch up, to meet their quota.

Though the weather is now less predictable, days on the water are usually colder and more blustery, the rockfish are there and will remain through the extension. Charterboaters will find the same in their season scheduled through Nov. 21 from the beginning.

Allow me to tell you what it’s like out there on the water. I have just returned from a chumming trip aboard Capt. Bruce Scheible’s Ellen S out of Scheible's Fishing Center at Ridge—a trip that was among my best ever on the Chesapeake.

Though the legal minimum size for rock is 18 inches, we imposed a voluntary 24-inch minimum, and promptly released all fish of less than that. Yet in two hours, the seven anglers aboard had their limit of two each. We had released more than 100 fish—all of which would have met the 18-inch legal minimum.

Nearby and also chumming was the headboat Bay King with 40 aboard. In two and a half hours each fisherman had two fish of 18 inches or more. The previous Sunday, 80 anglers on the Bay King got their limit.

It’s the same in the mid-Chesapeake for boats chumming at the Stone Rock area. From the Rod & Reel Docks at Chesapeake Beach, the headboat Tom Hooker also carries parties to their limits almost every time out.

Fishing like this is expected through the remainder of the season. Don’t miss it.

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Don Shomette: This Underwater Adventurer’s a Historian
by Eli Flam

Some 40 years ago, marine archeologist Don Shomette—who grew up near the Patuxent River—was transfixed by a pulp-fiction tale. A cataclysm in “the not-too-distant future” tore a hole in the Marianas Trench, at six miles down the deepest underwater point in the world, and sucked in all ocean waters.

What intrigued him was the revelation of what lay on the bottom: ancient cities, continents, lost lands like Atlantis. Relics of forgotten civilizations, hundreds of thousands of shipwrecks—Roman triremes, Spanish Galleons, majestic ocean liners…

“In the 40 years since,” Shomette says, “all these things have been revealed to us through marine archeology.

“Now we can go to the depths of the Marianas, and I’ve participated in this evolution.”

What would we see if the waters of the Chesapeake Bay were rolled back, as in the pulp story of his youth?

Up to 10,000 shipwrecks, Shomette estimates. In his book Shipwrecks on the Chesapeake (Tidewater Publishers) he documents more than 1,800 sunken vessels, recounting the stories of dozens of those disasters.

Historians examine documents. Archeologists go to the “physical remnants created by men and women,” Shomette explains. “Each vessel that sinks may become … a vast storehouse of the technology and culture of its day,” he writes in Shipwrecks.

The Chesapeake preserves its own history.

Even before the English came, the Spaniards had explored the Patuxent river. But the British staged the river’s “prime event.” During the War of 1812, British forces sailed to Bladensburg, then a deepwater port, from there marching to sack Washington.

Even earlier, Royal Navy forces raided and pillaged up and down the Bay, in that time “virtually a British lake.” Operating from a fortified base on Tangier Island, they harassed commerce throughout the Tidewater. Marylander Capt. Joshua Barney, a Revolutionary War hero, planned to stop them.

He organized a “flotilla” of 27 sailing and rowing craft. They sparred with the British, holding them off for months in what Shomette describes as the only major U.S. military incident in the Bay area. Finally Barney’s grab-bag flotilla was locked into St. Leonard’s Creek. To avoid capture, the Marylanders sunk their own vessels.

“Barney couldn’t even get reimbursed [by the U.S. Navy] for his clothes,” Shomette recounts. “The attitude was, ‘You lost.’” In time he died from his wounds. The sunken hulks, salvaged in part after the British withdrew from the Patuxent, were largely forgotten, although watermen lost nets on the uncharted remains.

Then, in 1979, the Calvert Marine Museum and Shomette’s Nautical Archeological Associates found the fleet. The discovery waited for a remote-sensing survey. Underwater visibility is only a foot or so: the river gets some 286 tons of silt per year per square mile.

“Pay dirt,” says Shomette, “was four and one-half feet below the bottom.”

In arduous 12-hour days of diving inside a 4 x 4 x 8 foot wooden cofferdam, ceramics, cannon balls and pipes were recovered. Each item found, including a “tooth key” for extractions, was numbered to create a “mosaic of day-to-day life.” The expedition was one of the first to be videotaped; slides also made formed part of an exhibit that ran for 10 years at Calvert Marine Museum.

The ship they found was carefully crafted, unlike most of Barney’s hastily built fleet. “From all evidence,” Shomette deduced it was the flagship USS Scorpion. When the expedition ran out of money, the ship’s hold was filled in with sediment to assure the site’s continued preservation.

However, Shomette says, “our survey team was permitted to leave a memento of their own, a plastic milk jug, tightly sealed, containing the names of the last persons to visit.”

Another venture led Shomette out of Chesapeake Beach to the middle of the Bay with fishing boat Capt. Varice Henry, in search of the wooden propeller steam packet New Jersey, sunk in 1870 after a fire at sea.

Though visibility below was less than one foot, Capt. Henry, who “had never donned a wet suit in his life,” guided them right to the spot. “Just go down the anchor line, boys,” Shomette quoted in Shipwrecks, “and head due west. Turn right at the first mudbank and you can’t miss her.”

The New Jersey was a regular, hauling merchandise and produce on the Baltimore-Norfolk run. For her discoverers more than a century later, she was “a frozen moment in time.”

Shomette has located Civil War prison camp building foundations a half-mile offshore at Pt. Lookout and searched for original 17th-century settlements of Kent Island. His latest book, just out, is The Hunt for HMS De Braak: Legend and Legacy (Carolina Academic Press). The battered warship, thought to contain up to $500 million in Spanish treasure, was recovered with bitter controversy in 1986 in Delaware Bay. (One of his earlier books, Pirates on the Chesapeake, is in its third Tidewater printing.)

His latest project takes him to Mallows Bay, on the Potomac below Indian Head. He first visited this remote, rugged stretch of river in childhood visits with his father. Now, with Mike Humphrey, director of the Potomac River-St. Clement’s Island Museum, Shomette has identified more than a hundred “sites” ranging from prehistoric Native American log canoes to sunken freighter fleets from World Wars I and II.

It’s not just adventure and the lure of exploring such sunken “time capsules” that drives Donald Shomette. He sees his mission as sharing an underwater heritage endangered by our headlong ways. We’re literally burying a rich part of our past in accretions of underwater mud. And, he complains, we’re doing too little to exhume it.

He holds out hope for action from the U.S. Senate, where a bill has been discussed to fund historical marine archeology by income from breaking up mothballed, still afloat World War II merchant ships for scrap.

“Then again,” he considers, “some people consider them historic, and 50 years from now …”

Donald Shomette lives in Calvert County. Eli Flam, his profiler, is a retired foreign service officer who lives in Port Tobacco, in Charles County.

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