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Blue Crab Blues
by J. Alex Knoll

Spring sends a wave of life through the water. Slowly the Chesapeake warms, releasing many of its children from hibernation.

Buried in the muck, Blue Crabs stretch their limbs and test the water. Soon all but the weakest and the oldest will emerge from their long sleep, hungry to eat whatever their claws can grasp.

Above water, hunger also rises, as crab lovers ready their mallets and stock up on Old Bay. Crabbers paint their boats and ready their gear.

But for many Chesapeake watermen, last year’s crab season never began, and they worry that this year might be no better.

“It was one of the slowest years I’ve had,” said waterman Lou Doetsch Jr., of Grasonville, MD.

Doetsch, a bearded man who smiles as amiably and talks as freely as an old friends, has been crabbing since 1962. Last summer he supplemented his income repairing motors.

Just how bad was 1992's crab season? A little more than 30.25 million pounds of crabs were landed, according to Maryland Department of Natural Resources. That might sound like a lot, and if that many crabs were dumped in your lap you’d be scurrying.

• However, over the past 10 years, the annual commercial catch has averaged 48 million pounds, according to DNR.
  As does any business, crabbing has good years and bad.
• “If you look at the commercial records, it’s happened before,” said Harley Speir, project manager of DNR’s tidewater fisheries program. But, he said, “we want to make sure it’s a one-year thing.”

There’s good reason to play it safe. DNR valued last year’s crab harvest at more than $20 million. Add in related businesses—such as crab houses, picking and packing plants, bait suppliers, pot manufacturers—and Maryland’s crab industry nears $150 million, said Noreen L. Eberly, a seafood marketing specialist for the Maryland Department of Agriculture. “Its the biggest industry in the Bay.”

William J. Goldsborough, a fisheries scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, agreed that crabs are vital to the Bay. “If crabs drop off for an extended period of time, you’ll see a big effect,” Goldsborough said. In a worst-case scenario, there could be “people losing their boats and houses in some communities.”

Will crabbers take it on the chin again this year? Will there be crabs to keep the picking houses at optimum production? Will there be enough high-quality crabs to keep people filling the crab houses?

No Crystal Ball
Nobody knows for sure, but everybody's guessing.

“I think it’ll be better this year. There were a lot of peelers so there’s the possibility of big crabs this year, ” Doetsch predicted, hopefully.

The relatively mild winter could also boost the crab population. The warmer the weather, the more crabs that are likely to survive until spring, said Speir of DNR. We've “not observed any large-scale die-off of crabs over the winter, and no excess mortality is at least a good sign.”

Brian Rothschild, a professor at University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, bases his optimism on Virginia's winter dredge surveys of hibernating crabs. “They’re the same crabs in the winter dredge as Maryland’s summer catch. If you don’t see many crabs in the winter dredge season there probably won’t be many in the summer, ” he said. The surveys predicted last summer’s decline; this year “there seems to be an increase.”

Dredger Tommy Leggett disagrees: “The winter crab dredge hit a low last season,” he said, “and in my opinion it’s worse this season.”

Despite a master’s degree in Marine Science, Leggett calls himself as a “self-taught waterman.” He is also the western branch president of the Virginia Working Watermen’s Association, based in Gloucester County.

Crabs follow a seven-to-twelve year population cycle with “peaks of abundance and valleys of depression,” Leggett said. “I would say that we’re at the bottom and scientist’s would agree. We should see [the crab population] start rising.”

But other progniscators fear more than a low in the cycle. Some blame toxics in the Bay. Others cite poor weather conditions. Some accuse rockfish of eating too many crabs. Still others worry that both increased crabbing and Virginia dredging threaten the fishery.

The most likely explanation combines many causes.

The Pollution Premise
For decades the Chesapeake has been the rug under which we’ve swept our dirt. Unlike poor natural conditions, which change eventually, pollution does not go away.

“All that stuff coming out of those water purification plants and the factories—it’s gotta’ be killing something,” said Henry Bush, a Miller’s Island waterman. The loss of aquatic sea grasses in the Chesapeake is just one example of the damage caused by pollution, Bush said.

Herb Powell, general manager of Blue Heron Seafood Co. in Somerset County, blamed pollution in the Bay as a “major factor” in last year’s poor crab season. Nor is the state focusing on the source of the problem, Powell complained: “I don’t believe they're going after the big polluters, the big factories up in Baltimore, just the little polluters.”

However Mike Sullivan of Maryland's Department of the Environment doesn't buy that argument. “We've made tremendous progress ratcheting down on the number of pollutants from [industrial] sources,” he said. “The next step is to do more on the other fronts.”

High levels of nitrogen and phosphorous in the Bay add up to trouble for crabs and other marine life, Sullivan said. Combined, the two make the water nutrient-rich, encouraging algae blooms that block light and deplete oxygen, thus suffocating other marine life, he explained.

Most phosphorous and nitrogen comes from fertilizer and pesticide run-off, Sullivan said. But about 15 to 20 percent of the nitrogen entering the Bay is air-borne, from sources such as factory and power plant chimneys, automobiles and even fireplaces.

Survival of the Fittest
Crabs face natural threats and predators at every stage of their lives. Winds, currents, air and water temperatures all effect the crab population.

Fish and mammals prey on crabs—and so do other crabs. “There’s a fair amount of cannibalism among crabs. It appears to be a natural part of the crab cycle,” says scientist-dredger Leggett.

Then again, rockfish could be the culprit. Rockfish, or striped bass, are recovering from endangerment thanks to a strict catch moratorium over the past ___ years. Some see their return and crabs’ decline as more than coincidental.

L.K. Woodland will tell you that he’s been in the crab industry for more than 50 years—“too long,” as he put it. Woodland began as a waterman and now owns the Dorchester Crab Co., a picking house on the Eastern Shore. “Rockfish don’t only eat soft crabs,” he said. “They eat small hard crabs, too.” Woodland saw the proof first hand last fall. “While filleting rockfish, we opened up 17,” he said. “The smallest amount of whole crabs we found was at least five. The most was 47. That’s daily.”

DNR's Harley Speir won’t argue. “Striped bass are pretty opportunistic,” he said. “They do eat crabs, no doubt about it.” But, he added, crabs are a minor part of their diet.

Speir explained that the commercial catch records for rockfish and crabs over a 20 year period show “no relationship between the abundance of Striped Bass ... and the crab population.”

That, however, is nothing new. Crabs have always been a lower link in the food chain, which remains consistent from year to year. Weather conditions are less static.

“We had a very cold summer,” Pete Jenson said. “The average water temperature was much cooler.” Jenson, the director of DNR’s fisheries division of tidewater administration, suspects the low temperature had something to do with last season’s low crab catch.

Mike Oesterling, a Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences commercial fisheries specialist, discounted the cold summer’s effect since there were also few crabs in Virginia’s warmer waters. If the only temperature was to blame, Oesterling said, “we should have had crabs coming out of our ears, and that didn’t happen.”

Too Many Pots Spoil the Catch
Scott Smith, a soft-spoken waterman who listens to National Public Radio while working, has crabbed out of Town Point marina for more than 20 years. He worries that too many watermen have been channeled to crabs with the decline of other fisheries.

“Crabs need to have a good oyster and clam industry,” Smith explained. “You can’t have the thousands of watermen all working in one industry.”

When other fisheries dry up, Smith said, the waterman has little choice but to switch to another fishery. “He’s not going to go out and become a budget analyst.”

Last year, DNR licensed a record 15,858 overall crabbers.

The increase in crabbers has another effect, according to Lou Doetsch Jr. “Years ago, I could get by with 150 pots, catch 10 bushels of crabs. “Now I have to run around 300 to get 10 bushels,” he said.

DNR disagrees. “There is no evidence right now that we are over-fishing crabs to the point that reproduction is threatened,” says that agency’s Speir. If not immediate danger, however, Speir acknowledges a point of diminishing returns:

“Obviously if you have a number of fish or crabs in one place and you have a lot of people coming out and taking a lot of them over the week, and [the fish or crabs] can’t replenish themselves, there won’t be as many next week for people to catch.”

To Dredge or Not to Dredge
If you want a fight, tell a Virginia waterman that dredging threatens the crab industry.

Many Maryland watermen have long been picking that fight.

If Virginia dredging halted “for one year, we’d have more crabs than we’d know what to do with,” claims Miller’s Island crabber Henry Bush.

Illegal in Maryland, dredging is a significant part of Virginia’s crab industry. Come winter, as the water cools, female crabs return to the mouth of the Bay. They burrow into the mud to insulate themselves from the water’s chill. Many hibernating crabs never see spring. When Virginia’s regular crab season ends in December, the dredge season begins. It lasts until the end of March, when the regular season starts once again.

Dredging scrapes up crabs indiscriminately, Town Point crabber Smith said, and “is detrimental because it tends to pick up the egg-bearing females.” These females would otherwise lay eggs in the spring, he said.

No evidence proves that dredging is bad for the overall crab population, counters Oesterling, from the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. “We haven’t seen any effect on the resource in 40 years,” he said.

Speir, Oesterling’s commercial fisheries counterpart at DNR, also defends Virginia dredging. “I think that for the Virginia dredge industry to be singled-out is wrong,” he said. Maryland watermen harvest non egg-bearing females during the crab season and are “contributing to mortality.”

Nor does Virginian Tommy Leggett blame dredging for the dip in the crab population. Dredged females would be caught anyway come spring, Leggett argues. What’s wrong, he argues, are Maryland’s hypocritical dredging regulations. Dredged crabs from Virginia may be sold in Maryland, and, Virginia “allows Maryland crabbers to come down here and dredge.”

Still, many Maryland crabbers believe dredging should be stopped.

“You’d find a lot of people even here in Virginia who’d go along with a dredging ban, but I’m a fence-sitter,” Leggett said. “I think it would be a mistake to jeopardize what little fishery we have left without more data. It’s an excellent time to get that.”

Give Crabs a Helping Hand
What can be done to guarantee that last year’s slump won’t last? Natural population trends and weather conditions are beyond our control.

Still, everyone can help. The Bay’s continued health and cleanliness ensure that when natural conditions allow, crabs can flourish.

We can help reduce the amount of pollutants entering the Bay. How? Bring garbage back to shore. Maintain your septic system or petition your water treatment facility to reduce the amount of waste it releases into the Bay. Keep gasoline-powered engines well tuned, drive less and cut your energy consumption to reduce the amount of airborne nitrogen reaching the Bay.

As consumers, we also have clout on what crabs reach the market. “Ignore the junk,” Speir suggested. “Demand high-quality crabs.” Selectivity will drive down the demand for immature crabs, which will grow and reproduce, benefitting everyone in the long run.

Earlier this year DNR proposed to do more, restricting the days and the hours that commercial watermen could crab. This proposal met such stiff opposition from watermen that it was quickly withdrawn.

A blue crab advisory panel—made up of scientists, watermen, and members of DNR—is currently considering new regulations on crabbing. Pete Jenson, a member of this panel, said that catch limits, gear limits, and entry restrictions are being considered.

Such talk of increased regulations worries many crabbers.

“There’s enough restrictions on us as it is,” Grasonville's Doetsch complained. “Don’t limit what I can do. If I can’t make it now, why limit me to the amount of gear I can put out or limit my catch?”

But restrictions may be necessary to guarantee the blue crab’s place in the Bay and the economy, Speir countered. “We’re conservationists not preservationists,” Speir said. “We want [the blue crab] to be used 100 years from now.”

Popular Throughout the Food Chain (SIDEBAR)
Survival of the fittest rules nature, and crabs face their share of natural hazards before growing to a size where they interest people.

Female crabs spawning at the mouth of the Bay lay millions of microscopic eggs. The mortality rate is enormous. Only a fraction—just how many is anyone’s guess—survive to hatch during the spring. Beginning as pin-point-sized larvae, the crabs rely on favorable winds and tides to carry them into the relative safety of the Chesapeake. Otherwise they are swept out to sea where their odds of survival are minimal. Jellyfish, small fish and other plankton-eaters prey upon the defenseless larvae at this stage.

During the next three months, the surviving larvae develop into juvenile crabs, which are eaten by larger predators, such as rockfish, herons, racoons.

Crabs need warm water and plenty of food to thrive. As they grow, crabs become too big for their own britches, so to speak, and shed their shells. Until a new, larger shell forms over the next few days, these “soft-shells” are completely helpless—and recognizedly tasty. Anything that can get hold of a crab at this stage will gladly eat it.

With the approach of winter, surviving crabs head south and burrow into the mud. The harsher the winter, the fewer survivors come spring. Those that make it soon grow to legal size—five inches across from point to point. As the water warms, crabs shed more frequently, growing from one-quarter to one-third larger each shed.

Any crab that reaches the minimum legal size has defied the odds of nature. Now it must contend with us.

You Could Be Next
Ask Mike Harris of Rosehaven what a run-in with the Coast Guard can bring you. Or about the fishing trip that turned into a nightmare of nasty rumors.

Harris’s life has changed mightily since last June when his boat, Compensation, hauled in Maryland’s record rockfish—almost 65 pounds. The catch built his reputation as one of the promising young captains on the Middle Bay.

Less than a year later, his charter business hangs in limbo and so does his reputation, thanks to Coast Guard tactics and his own carelessness.

“Should I sell my boat? Should I look for another profession? What should I do?” wondered Harris early this spring.

His chilling tale begins on a glorious afternoon in September with Harris and his party loading up on spot, flounder and trout. They’re anchored near Sharp’s Island Lighthouse, a popular fishing grounds at the mouth of the Choptank River.

Harris, 45, notices a Coast Guard vessel weaving through fishing boats. He knows his horn is broken and that his boat, a 37-foot classic baybuilt, has a rough edge or two. But he has no clue to what is about to unfold.

The 50-foot Coast Guard vessel is swiftly upon them. Demands pierce the air from a bullhorn. Lt. Randall Barnabee and armed men board. They try to drop a police dog down to Harris’s deck but can’t get the job done in the light chop.

Next, Compensation is escorted to port with two Coast Guard officers on board, watching Harris. His charter trip has been terminated, an unusual occurrence. The Coast Guard says they’ve found safety violations: some of the life jackets don’t have reflecting tape on the inside as well as on the outside.

Back at his slip at the Rod and Reel dock at Chesapeake Beach, Harris finds it curious that they refuse to let his party off the boat. The dog, led on to Compensation, sniffs not only the boat but also Harris’s customers, Harris contends. They include a physician and two children. A crowd has formed to watch.

“It was not good for business, to say the least,” said Harris. He has figured out by now that this is a drug bust.

The dog found no drugs; neither did the Coast Guard. But the boarding party found other fault. They slapped Harris with a slew of charges including no working horn and a faulty toilet that flushed directly into the bay—a common but unwise method of treating waste.

Harris’s ordeal wasn’t over. During a hearing this year, Lt. Barnabee of the Coast Guard admits on the stand what this was all about: Harris was under surveillance for drugs—based on an informant’s tip.

News accounts carried this damaging and unproved allegation along with testimony that Harris hadn’t noted a DWI charge on his application for a new captain’s license. Suddenly, Harris was threatened not only with losing that license but also with the stigma of being a drug user or trafficker.

“It’s pretty frightening to think that if somebody doesn’t like you, they can just call the Coast Guard, and something like this can happen,” contended Stephen Boynton, of Vienna, Va., Harris’s lawyer.

Harris hasn’t been a choir boy. He admits to having known some wild characters. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous. But he insists that he hasn’t drunk in two years and that he has not used drugs or condoned them.

“I’ve been an athlete all my life, and I’ve never associated with drugs in any way, shape or form,” said Harris, a non-smoker who takes pride in his adventuresome spirit. He has gone on safari in Africa and survived the bear-filled Alaskan wilderness.

Harris submitted to a urine test by the Coast Guard after he was boarded. He was clean.

Barnabee insists that Harris’s case was handled properly as part of a crack-down on charter captains up and down the Bay. The Coast Guard began elaborate boardings about 18 months ago aiming at what Barnabee describes as unregulated, uninspected six-packs -boats taking out up to six in a party.

“I had what appeared to be credible evidence that he has been a user of cocaine,” said Barnabee.

Harris sees himself as a victim several times over. He wishes the Coast Guard would have done more checking before embarrassing him and branding him a druggie. He believes the Coast Guard loaded charges on him to save face.

Now he could lose his license or meet other sanctions depending on how a Coast Guard administrative law judge rules this spring.

“The real truth is that this was a drug bust gone bad,” Harris asserted. “How much is all this going to cost me in the long run because of people who don’t want to go out with me anymore?”

Whatever the ruling, Harris’s case is a lesson to fellow boaters. In maritime law, you may have to contend with rumor and hearsay more dangerous than any Bay squall. When you shove off, you leave many of your rights on the dock.

Consider Barnabee’s warning: “The Coast Guard has jurisdiction to board anybody anywhere. We can have a reason. Or we can have no reason.”

The Blue Monster
How’s this for a spring dream? You’re trolling in the Bay, your first time out in a season full of hope, and WHAM...ZINGGGGGG—the rod bends like a horseshoe, the line smokes toward the horizon and your heart starts hopping even in bed. Gotta be snagged.

Wait; something’s back there. Something mighty, pullin’ like a tugboat. Must be a ray. No, suddenly—it breaks water and, oh my God, it’s huge … a monster bluefish.

Fast forward in your dream. You’re on a dock and they’re clapping. Somebody hands you a check as big as that bluefish. WITH FIVE ZEROES. You must have won the Fisherman’s Lottery.

This may not be dreamland if you tie into that whopper during the 10th annual aluefish tournament, May 15 and 16, sponsored by the Maryland Saltwater Sportfishermen’s Association. Grand prize is indeed $100,000; total prizes are $192,000 this year.

Winning the Hundred Large will be a challenge. It would be awarded in ten annual annuities for catching the world’s record bluefish, bigger than the 31 lb., 12 oz. monster caught by James M. Hussey surf fishing at Caper Hatteras, N.C. in 1972.

“We certainly would examine the fish very carefully,” noted Rich Novotny, executive director of the association. (Their care could include a lie detection test.)

Novotny reminds you, of course, that you have 123 other ways to take home a prizes in what he calls the largest bluefish tournament on the East Coast. They expect over 1100 boats. (Phone 410/768-8666.)

Besides holding tournaments, the sportfishermen’s association lobbies for conservation bills and advises sensitive treatment of the Bay.

“If we don't have clean water for those fish to swim in, we’re not going to have fish for our future,” Novotny warns.

Whale of a Change in the Chesapeake?
Two Nicks and No Fin showed this year, as did Rabbit, known for some awesome acrobatics. But the real celebrity was Tattertail, whose knobby young head already adorns a postcard in New Jersey.

They’re part of a baker’s dozen of baby humpback whales who spent the first months of 1993 capering about at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. That’s baby, as in 30 feet long. Adults get up to 50 feet and can weigh 40 tons.

The whales showed for the first time in the winter of 1991, and nobody knows for sure why. But the pod has grown ever since, and people in the Southern Chesapeake Bay region sure do enjoy its visits.

Whales occasionally migrate far up the Bay. A 45-footer, probably a humpback, was spotted off Rock Hall above the Bay Bridge in the fall of 1991. But the return by this prize pod and the sighting of two even-bigger fin whales this year suggests that something’s happening.

In the Middle Bay area, people talk about the recent abundance of flounder and seahorses turning up in crab pots. Perhaps warming water is changing Bay life.

The humpbacks are known to head down to the Caribbean from their haunts in the waters off of New England.

Maybe the draw is the availability of fish and plankton at the mouth of the Bay. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe they got tired of Jamaican jerk sauce.

“There are dozens of factors, including the natural cycles of fish. But we really don’t know,” said Mark Swingle, of the Virginia Marine Science Museum.

The next sign may be carried by leaping dolphins, who have been coming into the Chesapeake by the thousands starting in May. They frequently are seen far up the bay.

The Virginia Marine Science Museum offers dolphin-watching tours starting in May. Boats leave from the Virginia Beach Fishing Center. For details, call 804/437-4949.

Way Downstream
Pollution does weird stuff. Now, research in England shows that sewage causes sex changes in fish. That’s right, male trout near sewage pipes are producing hormones, which is equivalent to a man suddenly starting to give milk.

Scientists attribute the change to hormones reaching the water from women taking birth control pills or, perhaps, to a heavy flow of detergents. They aren’t sure which, but they say evidence of sex changes is firm.
They said nothing about the quality of the filets....

In the Florida Everglades, scientists blame other pollution for killer algae destroying the state’s largest lobster nursery. The algae bloom has devastated underwater habitat for 300 square miles, wiping out the sponges that lobsters eat.

“There’s not a sponge left in Everglades National Park. They’re all dead,” lamented a state biologist. As with much pollution, the economic cost won’t be fully felt for years—when people start missing a whole generation of lobsters...

And then there’s the bizarre case of irradiated snakes in the former Soviet Union. Russian scientists report that patches of earth are so contaminated from the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster that radioactivity is showing up in the venom of snakes.

The scientists point to the one silver cloud they could find: Studying these giant glow worms, they are learning how radioactivity spreads after a nuclear accident.

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Greetings, Baysiders. With excitement we bring you our premier issue of New Bay Times, the new weekly newspaper committed to the Chesapeake. We promise you fun as we soar into the future in search of harmony on, in and around the Chesapeake Bay.

We want to create something new. In these pages starting today, New Bay Times will explore how we of the Chesapeake Bay can live as best as we can in a smart, sustainable way.

We know after travel aplenty that our Bay is a special place on this earth. The richness of her waters and the soil that bounds her, the diversity of creatures, felicity of climate and closeness to sanctums of power make this an extraordinary place to live.

We will plug you into the forces of the Bay by motor, sail and paddle. We will cook from the Bay and eat her finest dishes. We will introduce you to the Bay’s adventurers, wise souls and to her just plain folks.

Together, we'll plunge into the Bay and celebrate life .

In ways big and small, we intend to guard the Chesapeake. We will take on the polluters, bamboozlers and wetlands bandits. We’ll work with you to gather the flotsam and halt the poisons that seep into the Bay. We’ll refuse false choices, particularly the false choice between a sound economy and a clean environment.

The health of the Bay is linked to the vitality of businesses along her shore—as well as to the care of Baysiders. It’s a tragic error to drop our guard amid a few signs of Bay resurgence.

Our concern, as we will prove and you will see, is the quality and richness of life along the Bay.

Every week we’ll offer new adventures. Come along with us. Subscribe or pick us up weekly. Advertise with us. Enter our contests. Counsel us with your letters. Use our children’s pages, one of our special features.

Help us on our mission, old friends and new, so that we might help you flourish in bounty and wisdom along our great Chesapeake Bay.

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All the luck in the world to New Bay Times! A newspaper leads the way with its ideas and sets a goal.

My father, a brother and I all wrote for newspapers. My father, Robert Franklin Nowell, wrote for the weekly Maryland Gazette, and I copied out his stories because his handwriting was not good. My brother, William Nowell, published The Great Swamper in the 1950s. He wrote it in dialect, which was very popular at the time, but his dialect was all his own. At 20, I took over from my father, writing Shady Side news first for the Maryland Gazette and later for the Evening Capital.

But I’m jealous that your office is in Deale instead of Shady Side. Deale used to be back in the woods while Shady Side moved forward. Deale didn’t have a steamboat and we did. People from Deale would have to drive four miles up to Chalk Point to get to Baltimore. Then Deale took over the lead with the road. The road from Washington went right on to Deale and left us out. I’ve always wondered why it didn’t stop here. So I’ve always been a little jealous of old Deale.

I’m jealous, too, that you’re writing a newspaper and I’m not.

Miss Ethel Andrews, 104, is the Bay’s oldest newspaperwoman.
Shady Side, Maryland, April 5, 1993

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by Joe Browder
The Bay. When said and heard that way, the words mean more than a dictionary’s definition, more than a body of water, sheltered somehow from a larger lake or sea. The Bay means that a person knows about a special place.

This awareness is a gift to the people who have it, a relationship to the place and to other people who share the knowledge. The more we learn, from the Bay and from Bay people, the more valuable the gift becomes.

Often our best learning comes from questions rather than from answers, from wondering about seemingly small details or great mysteries. In this column, observations about nature and the Bay come from one small place of land, marsh and water in a community on the Western Shore of the Chesapeake—Fairhaven.

If Fairhaven were Flamingo or Panacea or Coconut Grove, we would be on bays named Florida, Appalachicola and Biscayne. Every Bay is different, but there are some things that many bays have in common. Most bays share what also makes each bay unique: their particular characteristics are greatly influenced by other, distant places.

Look at the pines that grow wild around the Chesapeake. Close to water on the Western Shore, and through much of what’s left of the natural pinewood flats of the Eastern Shore, the dominant native pine is the loblolly.

The tree is as southern as it sounds, one of the many signs that the Bay, our Bay, is the northernmost part of the south. With long soft needles, and flowers so rich with pollen that spring winds can fill the air with clouds of golden dust, the loblolly clings to our coast, but ranges far into the southern U.S.

We found our home on the Bay in 1980, quite by accident, when we got lost looking for another great southern tree, the cypress. Although the Bay’s influence allows cypresses to grow naturally up into southern New Jersey and Delaware, one of the northernmost genuine cypress swamps, Battle Creek, is in Maryland near Prince Frederick, in Calvert County. Battle Creek is protected by the Nature Conservancy.

Although we did eventually get to the sanctuary, some very right wrong turns took us first to Fairhaven, miles to the north. There, the smallest of bridges separated the Bay from a shallow, marsh-rimmed pond.

To the north and west, the marshes edged into wooded hills where a few houses could barely be seen. The pond’s many acres were clustered with herons and egrets, overflown by terns and gulls. Out on the Bay, osprey were nesting on the channel markers.

Ever since, we’ve nested in one of the houses in the hills. In continuous celebration, cypresses we planted that first year are now tall enough to walk under. The cypresses grow near the marsh close to a freshwater spring, with their feet wet, and the muck around them punctuated with earthen cones made by crawfish.

A few evergreen southern bayberry bushes are in the shrubby fringe between the marsh and the woods, where tall loblolly pines stand out. The scene could almost be along the Georgia coast, perhaps even the Everglades.

Just over a season ago, the remnants of a hurricane passed through the Chesapeake. Andrew was African air that travelled the Atlantic to enter Biscayne Bay and devastate the poorest communities of south Florida. The hurricane was energized again by the warmth of the Gulf of Mexico, turned north then east, and weakened went to sea for the last time after crossing the Chesapeake.

I left Miami the evening Andrew arrived there, and was in Fairhaven a few days later when Andrew’s final clouds and winds blew by. In one bay, and out the other. In both places, the stormy air smelled the same, but different.

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The Longest Memory on the Bay
Shady Side’s “Miss” Ethel Andrews

Having lived nearly 105 years in the Chesapeake-surrounded village of Shady Side, Ethel Andrews knows the Bay.

She has not been on the water since she was 99 or 100, when she rowed a boat for a photographer eager to show her spryness. Nowadays, the able-bodied, nimble-minded, sparkling-eyed Miss Ethel stays at home. There, she has three newspapers to read everyday and dinner to cook for herself, daughter and son-in-law. She has almost daily visitors, who come to lengthen their short memories.

Nowadays, she walks as far as the living room, there to look out on the West River just above its meeting with the Bay, which seems to her “more yellow, muddier,” nowadays. But days have been when she and a gang of children scampered across the Shady Side peninsula to frolic in the Bay. Afternoons her family sailed summer visitors to the shallow waters off Grandmother’s Point, with its sandy beach. Nights began with feasting on the Bay’s bounty.

Once, when Miss Ethel was a college girl returning home from Baltimore in a storm, her captain brother ordered: “Sister, you’ll have to take the helm while I batten down the hatches!” And so she steered the steamboat down the Patapsco River.

Miss Ethel knows Bay comforts and discomforts, Bay steadfastness and changes.

Files, mosquitos and sea nettles rank high among Bay discomforts. Miss Ethel remembers, “mosquito netting in the windows.… [When] screens were … forthcoming, we knew we were up to date.

“In the fall many of us had malaria, caught from mosquito bites,” Miss Ethel remembers. “Malarial attacks came on about three o’clock in the afternoon. At school, we lined up at the water bucket shelf to take our pills, passing the water dipper… Sometimes I would have such a high fever that I would become delirious, seeing angels instead of children swinging on the front porch.

“Sea nettles we accepted as part of the Bay. When one of us was stung, we picked up a handful of sand, rubbed it on the sting and continued walking out into the water.”

Bay comforts, however, blew away the discomforts. To the sweltering cities of Washington and Baltimore, the Bay spelled summer. People came by the boatful, Miss Ethel remembers.

“Beginning about the middle of June at the close of school whole families began to arrive, bringing their belongings packed in very big trunks, having come on the steamboat Emma Giles from Baltimore. They landed at Nowell’s pier which was built by my father at the mouth of Parrish Creek. Those trunks had to be brought by either sail or rowboat up the creek and onto our pier.… Many of these people stayed until school began in September.”

From 1888 (the summer before Miss Ethel was born) to 1967, her family operated the Rural Home for summer vacationers. That was before Bay prices rose. A week at the Bay in 1988 cost $3 per person; by 1967, the charge had risen to only $40. In its heyday, Shady Side boasted eight boarding houses for vacationers.

The Bay’s summer comforts were many: Miss Ethel remembers “sunset cruises on the Bay, day and late-night fishing trips, usually successful, for at this time the Bay was filled with fish, and afternoon transportation by boat to the bathing grounds.

“The guests would get overboard from the boat, some wading to the sand beach and some heading out toward deeper water for swimming.… The nonswimmers could wade and slide by their hands on the sandy bottom.” Miss Ethel has always been a nonswimmer.

Pay attention, now. Miss Ethel is about to reveal the secret of how to share the Bay with sea nettles.

“The women wore black suits, long sleeved and knee-length, with long black stocking and beach shoes. The suits were big and baggy and did not cling to the body to reveal body shape. Most of the women wore rubber bathing caps to protect their hair. The men wore black suits with short shirt sleeves and knee-length pants.”

The Bay fed as well as cooled and comforted. “From the Bay we got seafood: oysters, clams, fish and crabs. My mother served fried oysters for dinner every Friday.… In the summer, my father brought in oysters from his leased oyster grounds on Thursday to be shucked.… Crab cakes or fish [were] favorites at supper every night. The fish were Chesapeake Bay ‘hardheads’ unfortunately no longer available in the Bay.”

Much has changed since the days of Miss Ethel’s youth. Progress has made mosquitos less troublesome, sea nettles more. Progress has brought people in millions to the Bay’s shores, with wants and habits of an era when abundance seemed limitless. Now the century is old and the Bay’s bounty diminished. Before we wear out its hospitality, we must learn new habits.

“Outside my kitchen window, not a half mile distant, men in motor boats supplied with mechanized rigs slowly gather oysters from their leased beds. The men plant seed oysters in the spring after oyster season. It pleases me because oysters are disappearing from their natural beds.”

But what Miss Ethel knows best about the Chesapeake, you and I know too.

“The natural beauty of the great Chesapeake Bay adds luster to my life as it does to others,” Miss Ethel remembers. “I enjoy its many changing aspects due to wind and sun. Sometimes it appears angry, sometimes foreboding, sometimes inviting and smooth, or just plain gorgeous and inspirational.”

Many of Miss Ethel’s words here are borrowed from her 1991 autobiography, Miss Ethel Remembers, published by the Shady Side Rural Heritage Society (301/261-5234) and available from them for $10.95.

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