Spring Issue 2023

MARYLAND'S FLY FISHING TRAIL

Find new spots to cast a line

OCEAN SPORT ROAMER 30

Fish and cruise in comfort

MEET THE BAY'S RIVER OTTERS Turns out they're everywhere!

SPRING 2023

MAKING WAY Into Spring

WHERE SHORE ADVENTURES BEGIN

70

80

COVER: Cape Charles Harbor, Va. Photo by Steven Waltrich.

ABOVE: Crab Alley Bay, Chester Md. Photo by Andy Crowder.

PUBLISHER

John Stefancik

EDITOR

Jefferson Holland

CRUISING EDITOR: JODY ARGO SCHROATH

EDITORS-AT-LARGE: Ann Levelle, John Page Williams

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Rafael Alvarez, Kelsey Bonham, Ann Eichenmuller, Robert Gustafson, Noah Hale, Mark Hendricks, Marty LeGrand, Kate Livie, MacDuff Perkins, Angus Phillips, Nancy Taylor Robson, Charlie Youngmann

ART DIRECTOR

Nancy Lambrides

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Meg Walburn Viviano

MULTIMEDIA JOURNALIST: Cheryl Costello

DIGITAL CONTENT EDITOR: Kathy Knotts

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS: Jim Burger, Dan Duffy, Jay Fleming, Mark Hendricks, Mark Hergan, Jill Jasuta, Caroline J. Phillips, Steven Waltrich

GENERAL MANAGER

Krista Pfunder

ADVERTISING

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

Natasha Lee-Putnam • 443-458-3110 natasha@chesapeakebaymagazine.com

PUBLISHER EMERITUS

Richard J. Royer

CIRCULATION

Theresa Sise • 410-263-2662 office@ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

CHESAPEAKE BAY MEDIA, LLC

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, John Martino EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, Tara Davis 410 Severn Avenue, Suite 314, Annapolis, MD 21403 410-263-2662

ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

EDITORIAL: editor@ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

CIRCULATION: circ@ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

BILLING: billing@ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com

Something fishy for you

by Jefferson Holland

Was it Einstein who said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”? Probably not. But in my mind, the quote isn’t about insanity at all. It’s about fishing.

My Dad took a black-and-white snapshot of me at the age of 4 or 5, I guess, judging by the striped T-shirt and the skinny crew cut. I’m at the edge of the lake on my greatuncle’s farm in northwestern Pennsylvania, proudly holding a bluegill I had caught on a worm hooked on a safety pin tied to a string at the end of a stick.

The property changed hands long ago, and all of us kids were too young at the time to remember exactly where it was. We had only ever driven there in the back of the family Ford station wagon, after all. But six decades later, I rediscovered its location on Google Earth and found my way there in my own car. The place had hardly changed in all that time. I assembled my fly rod and fit up my line with an ancient fly from my dad’s old tacklebox, dropped it in the lake and instantly caught a bluegill – very likely a direct descendant of the one I had caught and released so long ago. Yay for fish. Yay for dads.

You’ll find a lot of fishy stuff in this spring issue. Starting on page 29, Marty LeGrand reports on Maryland’s new fly-fishing trail, then casts an eye on Tochterman’s, Baltimore’s timeless tackle shop on page 61. We’re pleased to announce that Marty’s article, “Saving Island Birds” in CBM’s November 2022 issue recently won the first place award in the Environmental Awareness category from Boating Writers International.

On page 45, Capt. John Page Williams reflects on the joys of the short season for “bull” redfish, also known as red drum in the southernmost portion of the Bay. And you don’t want to miss his review on page 11 of the Ocean Sport 30, a luxury performance cruiser that’s equally amenable to the angler, with features like a large cockpit that lends itself to jigging, bait fishing and trolling.

But the most efficient fisherman on the Chesapeake Bay turns out to be the elusive river otter, and you can read about how you, too, can help the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center study them by becoming an “otter spotter.” Kate Livie writes a delightful portrait of these cute, charismatic megafauna on page 39. Come to

think of it, I’m a sort of charismatic megafauna myself. Emphasis on “mega.”

To round things out, we sent our summer intern, Noah Hale on an overnight voyage aboard the Pride of Baltimore II. You can read his account of the adventure on page 6. Then on page 56, Angus Phillips writes about another Chesapeake-based adventurer, Matt Rutherford, who set off on a hair-raising expedition to chart the fjords of Greenland.

And of course, we can’t welcome spring without participating in the time-honored tradition of burning our socks. The customary ode to recite during the ceremony can be found on page 80.

Happy spring, dear readers, and hope to see you out there in the watershed somewhere, rod in hand, and this copy of Chesapeake Bay Magazine rolled up in your gear bag.

Privateer for a Weekend

A novice sailor learns his ropes.

by Noah Hale

Iknew the Pride of Baltimore II was supposed to be an eyecatcher. I once saw her swaggering into Annapolis Harbor with her sails proudly unfurled like a seafaring peacock just as the crowds were gathering around, eager to get a look. It was one of her scheduled arrivals that happen every year as part of her ongoing ambassadorship to harbors across the globe. But I could never

have fully appreciated her mission until I boarded Pride for the first time, to become a temporary member of her crew on an overnight cruise.

I was asked to meet the crew at Pride’s facility in an industrial part of Baltimore. It was dark by the time I was on my way, and I thought it would be hard to see the ship through all the city haze, but at almost 160 feet long and 110 feet tall, she was easy to spot.

I felt small when a crewmate helped me climb aboard under the colossal spars and bundled-up booms, and I was looking forward to seeing it in its full glory in the morning, when we would be southbound for Solomons.

I followed the crewmate down into the forecastle where he led me to my cabin: enough room for double bunks and some drawers and floorspace for my bags. Once I was situated, I

stepped out and sat down at the dining table where the rest of the guest crew was socializing. The paid crew needed to wait for the others to arrive before orientation, so in the meantime I chatted with the few of us who were already there. We were an odd bunch of amateur sailors, including a U.S. Navy veteran, a middle school teacher, an electrical engineer and a retired biomedical salesman, and we were all united by the joy of adventure. Even though most of us had been lifelong sailors— (I was the exception)—we had a feeling that sailing on the Pride was going to be one of our favorite sails.

The next morning, I awoke to a knock on my cabin door in time for breakfast. When we were done eating and drinking our coffee, we were told to climb back up the deck to meet the captain for our first muster, or roll call.

Captain Jan Miles is a tall, husky man who carries the kind of confidence that seemed suited for the reputation of the Pride. Having been involved with the ship since before it was even built and witnessing the

result of what he dubbed an “incredibly handsome vision,” he was by far the most knowledgeable of all of us about the history of the clipper and all she was capable of. Before we could see her at work, though, we had to get our hands dirty.

While the guest crew are not expected to perform all the same tasks as the paid crew, they are given some daily responsibilities. These were usually small- to medium-size jobs, but this depended on how much we wanted to get involved. My first assignment was to help clean off the rails with a squeegee and chamois, while some of the deckhands polished the bronze on deck.

Meanwhile, some of the crew started removing the fenders in preparation for our voyage. Unfortunately for us, the water looked perfectly still.

“All the wind was with us last night,” said one guest. We needed some mechanical assistance, and our engineer was sent down to start the auxiliary engine in order to get us moving. But the lack of wind did not

NOAH HALE

NOAH HALE

Far Left: Pride of Baltimore II running under full sail in the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race.

Top Left: Crew members furl the gaff-rigged mainsail.

Above: Tanith Anhaiser and Lucy Canfield climb the shrouds to furl sails before we anchor down on the Patuxent for the night.

mean we had less to do: as soon as we were loose, the crew rushed instinctively to check the lines and stow the fenders. They were constantly scrambling to prepare for their next task—on deck there was no such thing as “busy work.” They also encouraged us to watch and learn—some lines needed to be neatly coiled into harpoon knots, and others needed to be straightened out to dry. It might sound like menial work, but the work quickly familiarized us with the ship.

Throughout our trip, the crew would explain what we were doing and why it was important. And by the time we were a few miles down the Patapsco, it felt like we were starting to get used to the hustle and bustle and beginning to find our own rhythm. Our hard work would soon pay off.

It was about the same time that we saw the Bay Bridge ahead that we were

finally able to catch some wind, and we were encouraged to help hoist some sails. The mainsail, staysail, jib and fore topsail were all up in a matter of minutes as we watched the deckhands climb to the top of them in order to rig them per captain’s orders. It was a nerve-wracking procedure, but I couldn’t help but admire how calm they were going up. Their bodies

shimmered on their way up, and they looked like they were swimming rather than climbing.

Back on deck, I was given command of the helm. The first mate instructed me to find a reference point that would guide my steering, while making cross-reference to the compass in front of me. It was a visual balancing act that made me acutely aware of the movement of the ship, and for a few minutes I felt like I was one with her.

We could see the edge of Annapolis once we passed under the bridge: the copper dome of the Naval Academy Chapel glistened in the distance, and the wooden dome of the State House, though still under renovation, seemed to nod to the 19th-century style of the

Left: Crewmates Lucy Canfield (left) and Taylor Methven furl the mainsail.

SCOTT CROWELL

Right: The author, who woke up early enough to watch the sunrise over the Baltimore skyline.

BETSY BAETJER

Pride. We caught a lot of attention sailing through the area, as recreational boaters would casually ride alongside to take pictures. “You just made my whole week!” called one of them. But while it was pretty much smooth sailing for most of the day, we still needed to find somewhere to anchor for the night.

We eventually decided on anchoring close to Calvert Cliffs. The water here was notably serene, allowing us all to enjoy the sunset as we prepared to moor the ship. The deckhands climbed back up to the sails to furl them again while some of the crew and I helped lower the anchor with the windlass. It took two of us on either side to crank it down link by link. The only sound meanwhile was its diving down for several seconds until it hit the bottom of the Bay. When everything had been stowed and we had done all that we could, we were sent to bed. I fell asleep exhausted, completely content and charmed by the day.

The wind picked up the following morning, and we were able to sail the rest of our way into Solomons. For the guest crew, our arrival meant the end of our voyage, but for the others, it meant setting up displays for curious visitors who were waiting to learn about the Pride and its cultural importance. I felt lucky to have learned with my hands, and my time onboard helped me better appreciate the hard work that went into bringing this piece of history back to life.

To learn more about the Pride of Baltimore II and to see upcoming guest crew availability, visit pride2.org.

Noah Hale is a writer and an outdoor enthusiast born on the Eastern Shore. He currently lives in Annapolis. .

ON BOATS

Ocean Sport Roamer 30

by Capt. John Page Williams

Ocean Sport

Roamer 30

LOA: 30'3"

Beam: 10'9"

Draft: 35"

Weight: 12,500 lb. (dry)

Transom Deadrise: 20 degrees

Bridge Clearance: 10'1"

Fuel Cap: 400 gal

Water Cap: 80 gal

Waste Cap: 35 gal

Max Power: 800 hp

For additional information, visit www. oceansportboats.com and the Chesapeake’s Ocean Sport dealer, Seattle Yachts in Annapolis, www.seattleyachts.com

Ocean Sport’s Roamer 30 is a classic Pacific Northwest vessel with the region’s trademark backward-sloping pilothouse windshield for shedding rain and spray. She offers a huge cockpit built for fishing and a comfortable pilothouse/saloon for cruising. Obvious clues to the first use include an 8-rod rocket launcher on the aft end of the cabin top, cockpit sole fishboxes, and a large livewell in the center of the transom. For the second, note the fresh water and waste capacities, 80 gallons and 35, respectively, and the fuel capacity of 400 gallons. They are generous for a compact 30-foot vessel with outboard power.

The key to the design lies in the home waters for the vessel and the way folks use it out there. Originally built in LaConnor, Washington, on Skagit Bay about 50 miles north of Seattle, Ocean Sport boats now come from the Nordic Tug plant nearby in Burlington. Skagit Bay opens to the Queen Charlotte Islands, with the southeast end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, on the other side of them. To the north lies the Strait of Georgia, the open waters of Haida Gwaii, and the Alaska Inside Passage. Yes, families and groups of friends take off in boats like these on cruise/fish adventures for a week at a time, and yes, those boats have to be ready to run hard through serious seas and maneuver in heavy currents.

Now think about the uses to which a fishing/cruising family or couple could put this boat on the Chesapeake. By the way, the cabin top is plenty large

AMY JAMISON PHOTOGRAPHY

enough to stow kayaks, paddleboards, or even a couple of canoes for exploring creeks, coves and marshes. Consider a week long expedition from Annapolis to Havre de Grace and the mouth of the Susquehanna, with stops in places like Dundee Creek going up and Still Pond on the way home. Or a run down the Potomac from Alexandria to Point Lookout, with stops in Potomac Creek, Nomini Creek, the Yeocomico, St. George’s Island and Cobb Island. From Solomons, run across the Bay to Deal Island, Smith Island, Crisfield, Tangier, Onancock and back. From Hampton, run across the James to Smithfield and then up the river to Jamestown and the Chickahominy. The possibilities go on and on, with scenery, history and richly varied fishing opportunities.

Power for the Roamer 30 is a pair of big outboards on a large bracket. Our test boat, from Seattle Yacht Sales in Annapolis, mounted twin 350-hp Mercury Verados that gave her optimum cruise at 27 knots (4500

rpm), burning 27 gallons per hour. Conservatively, her range computes to 360 nautical miles. She’s a long-legged boat. Top speed, at 6200 rpm, was 39 knots. (We do note that the test boat’s 350s were Mercury’s supercharged inline six-cylinder engines that have since been replaced after an 18-year run. They’re proven engines, but Merc’s new 300-hp V-8s, while powerful, are less thirsty. The 300s also turn larger-diameter propellers [16" vs. 14.5"], so they generate more thrust. With them, expect more efficient cruise in the mid-twenties and a top end around 35 knots.)

The Roamer 30’s spacious cabin allows for three separate sleeping areas, one in the forward V-berth, one in the aft cabin, and one in the saloon. The full galley features a refrigerator/freezer, propane cooktop, microwave/convection oven, Corian counter tops, a deep sink and quality hardwood accents. The full standup head is equipped with an electric toilet, sink and shower. The cockpit is large enough to double as a dance

The dinette seats four and converts to a double bunk. The forward seat is reversible to provide a companion bench while underway. floor. Add several folding chairs and it becomes a natural spot for morning coffee or watching sunsets.

Test day off Annapolis did not offer seas to challenge the Roamer 30, but soft landings in powerboat wakes gave a hint of how easily her sharp bow sections and running bottom’s 20-degree deadrise would come down on gnarlier stuff. She maneuvered readily in simulated jigging maneuvers around Bay Bridge pilings and over the Severn River’s restoration oyster reefs. The big Mercurys purred as we worked the cockpit helm while watching the Garmin 8612 electronic display mounted there.

That large cockpit lends itself to jigging, bait fishing and trolling. The transom holds a 30-gallon bait tank, with raw- and freshwater washdown bibs to port and a stout door to starboard leading to a broad transom platform/engine bracket. The gunwales hold two vertical rodholders per side, with space for downriggers. Padded bolsters line the inner edges, with fiberglass toerails/shelves for gear like boathooks. A tackle box folds out of the cockpit side to port, and the aforementioned eight-rod rocket launcher mounts on the after edge of the cabin top.

Under the sole are four large storage lockers with drop-in bins for icing fish and storing safety gear, plus two 12-volt cranking batteries and four 6-volt deep-cycle house batteries. We’d wish for more rodholders, including lockable storage inside, a workstation for rigging lures and bait and more tackle storage. A handy owner could answer those queries easily. A step on each side of the cockpit leads to an

AMY JAMISON PHOTOGRAPHY

8-inch-wide side deck, with handrails all the way to the foredeck, as well as access to the cabin top for deploying paddlecraft. The foredeck holds an anchor bracket, windlass, and locker for chain and rode, with backup controls at the helm.

For cruising, the Roamer 30 provides a V-berth with storage in the forward cabin, a cedar-lined hanging locker there, and an enclosed head with a shower wand. Headroom is six foot two in the cabin and six feet in the head. The pilothouse/saloon offers another handrail overhead, a sign that the Roamer was built for safety in rough seas. The helm to starboard features a shock-absorbing chair. Electronics include a 16-inch Garmin electronic display connected to AIS, VHF, autopilot and radar. The dashboard tilts for access to wiring.

Aft of the helm is a galley with storage cabinets, AC/DC refrigerator, a stainless sink and faucet, a cutting board and a two-burner propane stove. To port is a dinette that seats four and converts to a double bunk. The forward seat is reversible to provide a companion bench while underway. The after seat’s base holds a microwave/convection oven. Aft of the dinette is the entrance to the double berth cabin tucked underneath the seats and table. Heating and air conditioning are available.

For daily checks and maintenance, there’s a lighted mechanical room, accessible through a hatch in the saloon’s sole. It holds an inverter/ charger, a 6-gallon water heater, the main freshwater pump, head plumbing, a midship bilge pump and access to the boat’s freshwater tank. Our test boat was hull no. 3 of the new series built by Nordic Tug, and her craftsmanship was excellent. It’s easy to see how the Ocean Sport Roamer 30 fits Pacific Northwest fishing/ cruising missions, but it’s not hard at all to see how well it would fit the Chesapeake as well.

Nordic Tugs builds the Roamer 30 and its stretched sister, the Roamer 33, to the same high standards of its own tugboat yachts. The price for our well-equipped test boat with Twin Mercury 350 Verado Outboards is $539,500.

Editor-at-Large John Page Williams is a fishing guide, educator, author and naturalist, saving the Bay since 1973.

The helm features a shock-absorbing chair. Electronics include a 16” Garmin electronic display connected to AIS, VHF, autopilot and radar.

2023 Nimbus T11 INVENTORY

2023 Boat Broker SHOWCASE

Titgemeyer explains that the process of helping you find a new used boat begins with “a giant Q&A.” “How much money do you want to spend? When do you want to be out on the water in your new boat? Are you okay with production boats or do you prefer custom boats?”

The toughest question is the budget, he notes. Finding the right boat at the right price requires the expertise you’ll only find with an experienced professional. “It’s juggling the age of the boat, the quality of the boat and the equipment the boat has,” Titgemeyer says. “You might buy a late-model Jeanneau at the same price as a 10-year-old higher quality boat, like a Tartan or Island Packet.”

There’s no such thing as a “perfect boat,” he cautions. “Once we figure out what the client really wants, that leads to balancing the trade-offs. The broker has that expert knowledge to guide the client from ‘I just started shopping’ to ‘This is the right boat for you.’”

Capt. John Kaiser Jr., owner of Yacht View Brokerage LLC, notes that boat buyers are far more sophisticated and well-informed than they were 20 or 30 years ago. “It’s so different from the days when people would find boats in the Soundings classifieds,” he chuckles. “Once you start looking for your next boat, you get obsessed,” he says. “There should be rehab for the boat-buying experience. When a new client calls me, 98 percent of the time, they already know what they want. They go to boat shows, they do their research, they have the means and you don’t have to qualify them.”

Good used boats are getting hard to find in the current marketplace, and when they do come up for sale, they sell quickly, Kaiser notes during a recent phone interview. “Today, I’m in Oriental, North Carolina, with the folks who

called me last week. They were referred to me by a buddy of theirs who bought a boat several years ago, and they wanted one just like it. That was last Thursday. Here it is Tuesday. We went from one phone call and here we are completing the survey today. That’s a typical day in the life of a typical boat broker today.”

Jim Dean, owner of Dean Yacht Company on Kent Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, has a deep background in servicing boats, and that gives him a unique perspective on helping a client buy or sell a used boat. “I’ve been a service guy since 2006,” he says. “When you’re looking at a center console, where’s the money? It’s hanging off the end. If the motors have been neglected, we don’t even want to consider it.”

Dean notes that one client gave up trying to buy a boat on his own, wasting money on flying to Florida to try to see a boat that wasn’t ready to sell. “He said, ‘That’s not my job. I want you to represent me.’ I can get the inside scoop. I can take a headache off your plate, talking to the other broker, getting the service records, finding out everything about the boat, making sure it’s been taken care of—making sure it’s the real deal. That’s what brokers do…We do all the paperwork. Buyers don’t understand what it takes to get that boat to closing. All the buyer has to do is look at the boat and agree on the price.”

With his service background, Dean says he can provide the added value of ongoing maintenance. “Now that you’ve got the boat, you’ve got to fix the items on the survey to-do list. Those five things, I know all the service guys, I can get them fixed. I manage the boat for the whole time you own it. I hope you become a customer for life.” 

“A good broker is a broker for life,” says Mike Titgemeyer, general manager of Crusader Yachts & Seattle Yachts in Annapolis. “It’s about relationships not transactions.” A good yacht broker might help the same client buy or sell three or four boats over the years.

2023 Boat Broker Showcase

Campbell’s Yacht Sales

P.J. CAMPBELL

410-829-5458

pj@campbellsyachtsales.com

P.J. Campbell has extensive experience in listing, selling and helping customers buy the boat of their dreams. Campbell’s Yacht Sales uses Yacht World/Boats.com to list our boats, in partnership with our website, social media and many other outlets. Our team is focused on building long-lasting relationships and providing our customers with an excellent buying and selling experience. If you have any questions on buying or selling your next boat, please give us a call. Campbell’s Yacht Sales would love to help you sell your boat or find you the boat you are looking for. We are with you from start to finish.

Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

WES WILLIAMS

410-745-4992

boatdonation@cbmm.org

Wes Williams has been helping people buy and donate boats at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum as the Director of Charity Boat Donations & Sales since February 2021. His primary responsibilities are connecting with buyers and donors, reviewing donation applications, picking up vessels by land and by water, and making the process of buying and donating boats as easy as possible. Wes is a lifelong boater with an extensive background working in marinas and with many different types of vessels.

Yacht View Brokerage

JOHN KAISER

443-223-7864

john@yachtview.com

Founded in 1988 and located in Annapolis, Yacht View Brokerage LLC, has been successfully listing, selling and co-brokering power and sail listings. We offer our quality listings through Yachtworld.com, which allows us immediate exposure of your yacht to the world of potential buyers, along with the finest yacht brokers locally and nationally that offer our listings to their clients. Captain John Kaiser Jr. has maintained a 100-ton USCG Master license since 1985. Growing up in a boatbuilding family (Kaiser Yachts in Wilmington, Del.), John has been directly involved in the design, construction and marketing of the highest quality yachts. Yacht View Brokerage LLC offers complimentary dockage (for up to 80 feet) in our beautiful, secure setting on the Severn River, until sold, with a direct sale commission of only 8% for yachts over $200,000. We work tirelessly for a sale time of less than 90 days. Call or text John and Jackie about your listing and selling your yacht today!

Crusader Yacht Sales & Seattle Yachts Annapolis

GORDON BENNETT

410-739-4432

Gordon@CrusaderYachts.com

As a licensed captain and Certified Professional Yacht Broker (CPYB), Gordon Bennett knows that buying a boat is a deeply personal decision. That’s why he takes a personalized approach to every sale, helping you navigate every step of the boat ownership life cycle. Whether you’re a first-time buyer or a seasoned seller, Gordon has your best interests at heart.

Crusader and Seattle Yachts offers a wide range of new boat brands, including Jeanneau & Tartan Sailboats, Excess Catamarans, Nimbus Boats, Nordic Tugs, Legacy Yachts, and more. From offshore cruisers to trawlers, they have the perfect boat to fit your current and changing needs.

Tri-State Marine

RON YOUNG

o: 410-867-1447, c: 410-294-3086

boatron@tristatemarine.com

Ron’s immense knowledge of the powerboat industry, and the close attention he gives his customers’ needs has earned him 100% in customer satisfaction ratings for the past three decades. His professionalism, honesty, and ability to provide critical information ensures that customers find the right boat for their lifestyle. An avid boater and fisherman, Ron is an expert—he has been advising customers on Grady-White and Parker Boats for 40 years. He also stays in touch with his clients for years after the sale serving as a valued resource and problem solver making most of them repeat buyers.

ROBERT WARREN

o: 410-867-1447, c: 301-325-3773 robert@tristatemarine.com

Robert’s in-depth understanding of powerboats, coupled with his passion for fishing, ensure that customers love to talk to him about boats. Decades of working with buyers while personally living the powerboat lifestyle has given him the ability to effectively match families with their perfect boat. Robert’s customers quickly turn into friends as he continues to work with them through the years perfecting their boating experience. Robert has been advising customers on Grady-White and Parker Boats for 30 years, making him an expert of our top-selling brands.

MIKE MCGUIRE

o: 410-867-1447, c: 703-618-4653 mike.mcguire@tristatemarine.com

Mike has been a boat broker for several years and has been in and around the industry nearly his whole life. As a lifelong boater Mike has a vast knowledge of all types of boats and fishing. This makes it fun and easy to work with Mike on finding the right boat for his customers. When Mike is not on the water you can find him on the golf course. Mike is a single-digit handicap and former professional tour caddie. 

2023 Boat Broker Showcase

Bluewater Yacht Sales

SCOTT MACDONALD

703-307-5900

smacdonald@bwys.com

Scott brings a lifetime of boating experience and a passion for fishing to our Annapolis office at South Annapolis Yacht Centre. Scott is a career sales professional and former business owner. His 35 years of domestic and international sales experience assures that he can quickly assess the needs of his clients and use his experience to find the right boat at the right price and to market his clients’ boats to maximize their returns. He is a licensed Florida broker and a USCG Master Captain.

JUD BLACK

757-846-7909

jblack@bwys.com

Jud has spent nearly every working hour in the boat business since the age of 15. He joined Bluewater in 1988 to run their small boat division selling Whaler, Seacraft, Zodiac and Evinrude outboards. This division was later consolidated into Bluewater Yacht Sales, where he joined the ownership and management team. He has been honored as one of the country’s top salespeople by Johnson Outboards, Regulator Marine, Hatteras Yachts and Viking Yachts over the years. He has been lending his extensive experience to Bluewater clients for over 30 years, and now serves as Bluewater’s Sales Director so he can lend his expertise to the entire team.

DAVID BLACK

443-944-6122

dblack@bwys.com

Captain David Black was born and raised in New Castle County, Delaware. David’s first offshore experience came in his early teens which was when he fell in love with offshore fishing and sportfishing boats. Once an adult, David earned his USCG Master license along with adding several endorsements throughout his career as a captain. In 2013, he started his own charter business, “My Cin Sportfishing,” and ran it successfully for several years before becoming a yacht broker. David’s combination of sales skills, customer service, and vast boat knowledge makes him a great asset for helping clients find their next dream boat.

SCOTT JAMES

757-570-3944

sjames@bwys.com

A lifelong resident of York County, Va., Scott started fishing the Mid-Atlantic Coast with his father at a young age and fishing crab pots from his own boat while in his early teens. After graduating from ODU, he began a career in the electric utility industry that spanned 14 years. During this time, the saltwater kept calling, and he acquired his USCG Master license and left the utility business to make a living on the water. Over ten years ago, Scott started selling and brokering boats and yachts and has developed lasting relationships with boat manufacturers, marinas and customers.

MARK CONNORS

757-406-1673

mconnors@bwys.com

Mark Connors got his start in the marine industry in 1993 while living in Annapolis. After attending Hampden-Sydney and Washington College, he began his career working for the Annapolis Sailing School and Powerboat School. Afterwards, Mark formed Connors Marine Services where he ran a busy yacht delivery and maintenance service before becoming a broker for Baker Marine. Mark was recruited by Jarrett Bay Yacht Sales in 2006 as Broker-in-Charge of their Virginia office. A full-time broker since 1998, Mark has had experience with a wide variety of boat manufacturers spanning multiple styles and uses.

CHUCK MEYERS

703-999-7696

cmeyers@bwys.com

Chuck acquired his USCG Master license after graduating from Catholic University of America, and he made the decision to turn his passion for yachting into a full-time career. In 1994 he went to work managing a marina and boatyard which furthered his skills in both maritime management and the yacht service fields. In 1999, Chuck started a career in yacht brokerage and has since established a loyal base of clients who have entrusted him with their vessels. Chuck is eager to help new and existing customers and is involved in all aspects prior to, during and after the sale.

CARL BEALE

757-708-0786

cbeale@bwys.com

Carl Beale graduated from James Madison University with a degree in finance and is certified by FINRA as a financial advisor. He first joined the Bluewater team in 1995 and has been involved with the company in different capacities for over 20 years. Carl has worked as a boat detailer, a delivery captain, a demo captain and a sales professional in his tenure, and his love for boating brought him back to the Bluewater team. Carl prides himself on helping his customers find the right boats so that he can watch them develop their appreciation for the water.

HANK SIBLEY

804-337-1945

hsibley@bwys.com

Hank began in the boat business working with his father at the boatbuilding firms Gloucester Yachts and Chesapeake Powerboats in the mid1980s. He has since worked in sales capacities in the construction and marine supply businesses, and prior to joining Bluewater in 2011, he sold new and brokerage boats in Virginia Beach. Hank is a long-time sportfisherman and has known the Chesapeake since his youth. He and his wife Beverly have two boys and live in West Point, Virginia. His boatbuilding and fishing background is an asset in matching clients to their perfect boat.

ROGER MOONEY

410-456-3659

rmooney@bwys.com

Roger began in the yacht brokerage and sales business in 1995, working for a Maryland-based company which brokered quality production powerboat lines. Having a desire to deal more exclusively with custom and production sportfish, motor yachts and trawlers, Roger moved on to work with Gilman Yachts in 1998, and then in 2004, Roger opened the Maryland office for Bluewater/Jarrett Bay Yacht Sales where he continues to enjoy serving his customers’ boating needs. Roger’s success in his career is not only due to his vast knowledge of the industry, but also due to the integrity and diligence he demonstrates to his clients.

HAWK ENNIS

240-383-8128

hawk@bwys.com

In 2005, after a successful career in the mortgage business, Hawk decided to follow his passion for boating and began working with a yacht brokerage firm in Annapolis. He found what he was born to do and within a couple of years opened Hawk’s Yachts which eventually morphed into Hawk’s Marine. During that time, he sold over 300 boats including new, used and brokerage boats. He is now a proud member of the Bluewater Yacht Sales team located in the heart of Annapolis. When not brokering or boating he enjoys spending time volunteering, traveling, fishing, and visiting friends and family.

JEREMY BLUNT

410-507-4150

jblunt@bwys.com

Jeremy Blunt fell in love with offshore fishing when he went tuna fishing for the first time upon his arrival in Ocean City. He worked that summer at the Ocean City Fishing Center, then worked as the captain on several charter fishing boats. He began his broker career in 2007. In addition to being a sales professional, he is also a tournament-winning charter captain out of Ocean City. This gives Captain Blunt a unique perspective and experience that translates into the right deal for your dream on the water.

CONNOR HALL

757-968-2353

connorhall@bwys.com

Connor first joined Bluewater in 2013 at 16 years old as a dock hand at the marina. He worked the following summers commissioning Regulators in the service department. As a USCG licensed captain, Connor has moved Bluewater inventory up and down the coast. After graduating from Hampden-Sydney College with a dual major in business and economics in May of 2020, he joined the sales team at Bluewater, which was a goal of his for quite some time. Joining Bluewater is more than a job opportunity for Connor, but a natural next step in his career.

JOHN PRATHER

301-991-3308

jprather@bwys.com

Captain John Prather is a Maryland native who has been fishing since childhood. Being a professional fisherman for the past 20 years, John has gained extensive knowledge about countless styles of fishing, both inshore and offshore. John has a vast understanding of boat building and has been through the entire build process on several boats from 20-foot outboards to some of the largest sportfishing boats on the market. He has close relationships with some of the top boat manufacturers in the country, and with more than two decades of experience, his knowledge of boats is hard to match.

CHASE SUTTON

410-507-5247

csutton@bwys.com

A native Annapolitan, Chase grew up on the water and has a passion for sharing his love of the water with others. As a member of the Annapolis Yacht Club, Chase is strongly involved in the local community. He enjoys being with his family and friends, traveling, sailboat racing, fishing, and helping to preserve the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding tributaries. Before joining Bluewater, Chase came from 10 years of business development and sales leadership in the corporate world. He has brought his skills into the marine industry by being detailed, determined, and dedicated to making seamless and efficient transactions.

VERA SOHOVICH

410-533-7588

vsohovich@bwys.com

Vera Sohovich established and runs Bluewater’s all-inclusive marine finance department. Prior to joining Bluewater Yacht Sales, she worked for another yacht brokerage firm, and held key positions including comptroller, finance manager and sales manager. Vera developed and managed the in-house finance department and established relationships with the best banks and lending institutions to provide clients with competitive rates, great terms and unsurpassed service. She now works to provide Bluewater customers with complete financing and documentation solutions so they can complete the buying process with ease. 

Bart Hiltabidle is one of the most recognized names in the Annapolis boating community. Bart has helped shape Boston Whaler’s legacy in the Annapolis area. Whether you are in search of a 13-foot Super Sport or the flagship Boston Whaler 420 Outrage, Bart has the knowledge and expertise to help narrow your search for the perfect boat. Chesapeake Whalertowne opened a new and exciting location

Seattle Yachts Annapolis & Crusader Yacht Sales

JEFF JORDAN

410-320-5183

Jeffj@SeattleYachts.com

Jeff Jordan comes to Seattle and Crusader through sailing school, coaching and yacht delivery experience. Jeff is a long-time marine industry pro and has a wide experience on the water with both power and sailboats. He has a keen eye and understands a client’s needs. Jeff shares his personal experiences to make the buying process thorough and enjoyable. Jeff will assist in your purchase or sale with thoughtful appreciation for the process and has the client’s interests prioritized.

Crusader and Seattle Yachts offers a wide range of new boat brands, including Jeanneau & Tartan Sailboats, Excess Catamarans, Nimbus Boats, Nordic Tugs, Legacy Yachts, and more. From offshore cruisers to trawlers, they have the perfect boat to fit your current and changing needs. 

Buy Your Next Boat

The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s Charity Boat Donation Program makes the process of buying

FROM THE CHESAPEAKE BAY MARITIME MUSEUM

25' 2021 Jeanneau Leader 7.5 CC $109,900 25' 2021 Scout Dorado $179,900

32' 2022 Sea Ray 320 Sundancer $399,900

1998 Formula 41 PC $92,500

2012 Beneteau ST44 $479,000

44' 2014 Beneteau GT44 $395,000

50' 2019 Beneteau MC5 $949,000 50' 2020 Beneteau ST50 $1,190,000

2023 Boat Broker Showcase

Pocket Yacht

JOSH MILLER

810-531-9191

jmiller@pocket-yacht.com

Josh grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and originally hails from Kent Island. A 1998 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, he served a few short years at sea, and then realized his lifelong dream of becoming a Coast Guard helicopter pilot and aeronautical engineer. After a fun-filled career of 25 great years and having the privilege to live on and fly over all four sides of the U.S., Josh retired as a captain in January 2023 and joined our team. A passionate outdoorsman and lifelong boater, Josh brings a unique perspective and breadth of experience from the lens of both an operator and first responder. An avid hobbyist, Josh spends his free time remodeling houses, beekeeping, hunting, fishing, and cycling among many other pastimes.

JOHN OSBORNE

410-490-6250

john@pocket-yacht.com

After closing his houseboat sales and brokerage business in 2010, John ran a local brokerage until 2014 when Mark Schulstad offered him a position at Pocket Yacht. John has become one of the top performers at Pocket Yacht and has won several awards over the last nine years. John prides himself in his ability to talk with customers honestly and put people at ease during the purchasing process. Having a quality product and strong leadership is the key to John’s success. John is a long-time resident of Maryland’s Eastern Shore and spends his free time cooking and fishing. He resides in Easton, Md., with Carol, his wife of 43 years.

TIM WILBRICHT

410-267-2577

timwilbricht@pocket-yacht.com

After a short but successful career in the corporate world, Tim bought a 38-foot sailboat in Annapolis in 1993. He and his wife, Mischelle, headed to the Bahamas when they were both 25 years old. After spending time in the islands, they returned to the States to seek another new adventure. He helped start a couple of companies, one in Florida and the other in Boston, growing them until the companies matured. During that time Tim fell more and more in love with the boating lifestyle and lived aboard with his family for 9½ years. During that time, he came back to Annapolis where he began work as a yacht broker in 1998. He continues to share his passion for boating and has had an amazing career selling boats of all shapes and sizes. 

T 40 Sloop

2023 Boat Broker Showcase

Clarks Landing Yacht Sales

BETH CIANCAGLINI

443-534-1339

bethc@clarkslanding.com

Beth is a Hillsmere Shores native who grew up with a deep love for boating, crabbing, and fishing. As the first mate on a charter fishing vessel, she passed her passion for the water on to her children. Beth now combines her professional expertise with her personal passions as a member of the Clarks Landing team. She is committed to providing excellent service to her clients, which sets her apart and earns her recognition from brands like Beneteau, who named her a “Top Gun.” Beth’s enthusiasm and industry knowledge make her a valuable resource for anyone looking to explore the joys of boating.

KT NESBITT

443-370-4720

KT@clarkslanding.com

KT Nesbitt is a passionate individual with a lifelong love for life on the water and what he calls “yachttirement.” After working in luxury car sales, KT transitioned into yacht sales, where he found his true calling in helping clients find the perfect vessel. With expertise in popular brands such as Sea Ray, Beneteau, and Wellcraft, he is a valued member of the awardwinning service and sales team at Clarks Landing. KT’s dedication to his clients and his knowledge of the industry make him an excellent resource for anyone looking to start their own yachttirement journey.

Deltaville Yachting Center/Chesapeake Yacht Sales

GORDON INGE

804-896-3003

gordon@dycboat.com

Gordon Inge, Chesapeake Yacht Sales Yacht Broker and General Manager of Deltaville Yachting Center (DYC)/Chesapeake Yacht Sales (CYS), has a lifetime of experience in boating, service and sales. Located on Broad Creek in Deltaville, Va., and owned and operated by Lew and Onna Grimm since 2001, DYC/CYS provides a friendly environment to buy, keep and service your boat.

Named “Best of the Bay,” “Best Place to Buy a New Boat,” and “Best Boating Facility,” CYS is a dealer for all models of Catalina sailboats and True North Downeast-style cruisers. Combining a large inventory of preowned power and sail boats onsite with a professional network search, Gordon will get you in the right boat for your needs.

MARYLAND’S New Fly Fishing Trail

BY MARTY LEGRAND

ove over, Montana. Outta the way, Outer Banks. Maryland, too, wants to woo the Woolly Bugger crowd. The Old Line State has launched the nation’s first statewide trail of fly-fishing destinations in a bid to boost tourism and promote a popular pastime (one of whose delightfully named flies is Woolly Bugger).

It’s opportune timing; fly fishing is enjoying a renaissance that’s drawing in newcomers and revenue but clogging some well-fished Western waterways to the extent that one angling journalist called the situation “Rivergeddon.” Organizers foresee no such apocalyptic conflict on Maryland waterways, where fly fishing has maintained a lower profile. The state

has sufficient angling elbow room; it’s about 22 percent water—2,700 square miles of it, larger than the entirety of Delaware.

“We recognized there’s an opportunity for Maryland to draw in more fly fishers, not only residents but other people—to make Maryland a fly-fishing destination,” says Rich Batiuk, a fly fisher and conservationist from Annapolis. “It’s not Yellowstone, but what Maryland has to offer in its confines is, I think, unprecedented; within a two- or three-hour drive, for most Marylanders, you can have some phenomenal, but very, very different fly-fishing experiences.”

Batiuk and four other avid fly anglers developed Maryland’s Fly Fishing Trail, an itinerary for fly

Top: Brown Trout at the end of a fly line on Morgan Run.

Above: Murray's Blond Perch fly pattern.

BATIUK

fishers that divides the state into five regions. A virtual roadmap to destinations, the trail website, fishandhuntmaryland.com/marylandsfly-fishing-trail, lists 48 suggested flyfishing spots, two for each of the state’s 23 counties and Baltimore city. (Yes, urban fly fishing exists.) Each location’s description includes the what (fish species), when (seasons), where (site access details), how (fishing methods such as wading, boating or casting from shore) and who (instructors, guides and tackle purveyors).

In Maryland (aka “America in Miniature”), fly fishers can target dozens of species: wild brook trout in Garrett County’s mountain streams, scrappy smallmouth bass in the Upper Potomac River, perch and pickerel in a suburban Baltimore reservoir, largemouth bass and catfish in a defunct gravel mine-turned-lake near the nation’s capital, striped bass and flounder in America’s largest estuary, Chesapeake Bay, and even sharks and bonito in coastal waters. In other words, a little bit of what Montana, the Great Lakes, the mighty Mississippi, the Outer Banks and the Florida Keys have to offer anglers, all compressed in a state roughly half the size of Lake Michigan.

And you thought fly fishing was just about trout.

For all its mystique and aura of upper-crustiness, fly fishing remains the fundamentally simple pastime that it’s been for centuries. Its appeal is elemental; its implements almost primitive: a flexible rod, a weighted line and a homespun, non-sentient bait—the fly.

It’s a heck of a lot of fun and easier to grasp than you might imagine. I learned rudimentary fly fishing in a day from an instructor wearing a kilt. We weren’t in Scotland. There was no loch. Nor salmon. Our small class of novices matriculated knee-deep in the Patapsco River near Ellicott City, a bass fishery, three women in pants schooled by a man in a skirt.

Since that spring day years ago, I’ve enjoyed moments that every fly fisher savors; unfurling your line in a graceful loop toward its target; placing the fly—a feathery, furry baitfish or insect imitator—just so to attract a fish; and, when everything comes together, feeling the line in your fingers suddenly signal that you’re tethered to a creature that’s none too pleased to be hoodwinked.

“As we say, the tug is the drug. It could be a little small thing, but you fooled it, and you felt it with a twoweight rod,” says Batiuk, referring to one of fly fishing’s most delicate rods. (Fly rods range in “weight” from 0 to 16, proportional to the weight of the line and, generally, the heft of the fish they can wrangle.)

Over coffee one afternoon, Batiuk explained to me why the group wanted to create a virtual trail, how they persuaded state agencies to make it happen and why passionate fly fishers are latter-day Izaak Waltons, rhapsodizing about fly fishing’s restorative nature, pastoral beauty and special camaraderie that’s spreading beyond the pastime’s traditional Anglo-Saxon male practitioners.

The idea was the brainchild of one John Neely, then head of the Maryland Sport Fisheries Advisory Commission.

Above: A striped bass caught at Janes Island State Park.

He broached the notion with Batiuk, a fellow member of the Free State Fly Fishers based in Anne Arundel County. They enlisted three other fly anglers and the Founding Five met over lunch in Annapolis two years ago to hash out details and a strategy for implementing what, as far as they could determine, was the first statewide trail for fly fishers. (A few states already have regional trails.)

“We were interested in a virtual trail, starting out with a website that would have stations on it and information,” Batiuk says. They received the blessing of two state agencies: the Department of Commerce, specifically its Division of Tourism, and the Department of Natural Resources and its recreational

fishing division—the latter after assuring DNR officials they were seeking input from fisheries staff, not the agency’s endorsement of fly fishing over other sportfishing methods.

On September 24 last year, the virtual Fly Fishing Trail debuted on the Fish & Hunt Maryland website, an existing DNR-tourism partnership promoting outdoor sports and tourism in the state. The trail’s 48 sites

represent only about one-tenth of those initially suggested by parks, counties and fisheries officials as well as local fly-fishing organizations.

“We ended up with over 400 locations across Maryland,” Batiuk says of the master list, a number far too great to make the project workable and site information sufficiently detailed. The Fly Fishing Trail Team, as the five organizers call themselves,

Right: An Eastern Shore pickerel

Below: The Youghiogheny River

JOE BRUCE

CHUCK GALLEGOS

worked to narrow the field. They applied specific criteria: public accessibility (on state, federal or local government land), diversity of fishable species, at least three-season fishing and access for the physically challenged. Batiuk says the group favored waters that weren’t already well known and targeted communities that weren’t already well represented (people of color, women and teenagers more into phone-scrolling than fishing).

“John and I both were very passionate about looking at ourselves, looking at fly fishing groups that we went out with,” Batiuk says. “We were a lot of older, white gentlemen. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but what makes America beautiful is its diversity, whether it’s food or culture or perspectives. We wanted the same thing in fly fishing.”

Free State Fly Fishers had already been working with groups such as Outdoor Afro, which promotes outdoor recreation among African Americans. Women fly fishers were growing in numbers when I joined their ranks in the 1990s and, thanks to clubs such as Chesapeake Women Anglers, that

trend has continued. And fly fishing is being introduced as therapy and diversion to those whose bodies and minds could use a boost: breast cancer patients (via Casting for Recovery), severely injured servicemen and women (The Wounded Warrior Project), traumatized veterans and first responders (Heroes on the Water) and foster children (The Mayfly Project).

And when COVID-19 affected us all, fishing—of any kind—inoculated us before Pfizer and Moderna came to

the rescue. Sales of saltwater and freshwater fishing licenses to Maryland residents spiked in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, echoing a national trend as the virus-wary sought safe harbor outdoors. Before the newly angling-smitten can wriggle away, the nation’s fishing advocates developed a plan to keep them hooked. It’s called Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation (R3). Fly fishing is one of its components, with good reason.

An estimated 7.5 million Americans fly fished in 2021, according to a report last year by the Outdoor Foundation and the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation. That’s nearly 500,000 more than the pre-pandemic level and almost two million more than a decade ago. Fly fishing hasn’t been this popular since Brad Pitt and Montana’s mountain scenery made it fashionable 20 years ago in Hollywood’s adaptation of Norman

Left: Outdoor Afro colleagues at a Free State Fly Fishers casting clinic.

Below: Redfish, speckled sea trout and flounder lurk in the rising tide and falling tide of the marshes.

RICH BATIUK

LUIS SANTIAGO

Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It

If you’re not familiar with fly fishing, what sets it apart is the line. In most fishing, the weighted lure does the work of casting; the virtually weightless line simply rides along. In fly fishing, the weighted line propels lightweight lures (flies), and the angler does some fancy casting to make that happen. (Fishing’s equivalent of cowboy trick roping, but much easier to master.) And instead of reeling a fish in, fly fishers retrieve the line by hand (called “stripping”) to fetch their catch.

Fly fishers represent a smaller subset of Maryland’s anglers (it’s hard to know how small; the state sells trout stamps but does not offer special licenses for fly fishing), but they enjoy the same bonanza as other anglers: 50 some species of fish to pursue, more than 500 public water access sites and a half-million acres of public lands.

Between them, the five trail team members have fished every one of the trail’s sites, so they cast whereof they speak. Ask Batiuk about his favorite spots and you’ll appreciate two of fly fishing’s most compelling aspects, immersion in nature and that “tugdrug” appeal he speaks of.

He extolls the Eastern Shore’s tannin-stained upper Pocomoke River, where he kayak fishes and his wife, Susan, photographs their surroundings. “That place is just magical, especially that first mile or two. You’re almost waiting for a dinosaur to come out, or a six-foot winged dragonfly,” he told me. “We’re always sort of sad when the river starts to open up. I’ve caught largemouth bass, stripers, yellow perch, white perch, bluegills, different sunfish, pickerel. And the water’s so dark you literally don’t know what you have because you can’t see more than three to six inches down.”

He says another favorite is Janes Island, near Crisfield, where he fishes with a friend on the latter’s flats boat. “Some of my favorite memories are in Janes Island, catching that rising tide and falling tide. Redfish, speckled sea trout and flounder; I’ve caught all those guys casting the marshes. You see that undercut bank and then . . . you got it!” he says, setting an imaginary hook as we talked.

Some Chesapeake charter boats specialize in fly fishing. Captain Gary Neitzey, whose Fish Hawk Guide Service is based at Kent Narrows, says about 90 percent of his clients are fly fishers. Neitzey has been fly fishing

Above Left: An Octoraro hickory shad on a rainy afternoon.

Above Right: A North Branch Potomac River brook trout.

JOHN NEELY

KRISTI DRAKE

since he was a kid, starting with a fly rod his mother bought with Top Value trading stamps. He used to shoe horses professionally until his back gave out and he switched to guiding.

Fly fishing has become more popular in recent years, he says. “It kind of went through a lull for a while. I still have a lot of regulars who’ve been with me for 20 years, but there has been an increase in interest,” he says, notably from anglers in their 30s and 40s. He likes to run his 24-foot centerconsole into Eastern Bay and the mouth of the Chester River in search of striped bass and, occasionally, bluefish or Spanish mackerel.

Some of fly fishing’s biggest names have been Marylanders, including the man they called the Babe Ruth of fly fishing. The late Bernard “Lefty” Kreh, a Maryland native and a casting wizard, was an author, instructor and innovator. The famous saltwater fly he conceived for striped bass, Lefty’s Deceiver, remains a fly box standard and even earned a spot on a U.S. postage stamp.

Fly fishers following Maryland’s new trail can fish in Lefty’s bootsteps on the upper Potomac near Weverton Cliffs, where Kreh caught his first fish on a fly rod (a smallmouth bass) under the tutelage of another legendary Maryland fly fisher, Joe Brooks. The upper Potomac was one of two Maryland locations cited in Kreh’s book, Lefty’s Favorite Fly Fishing Waters, which highlighted 40 U.S. waterways. The other, the brown trout fishery at Gunpowder Falls, also appears on the Fly Fishing Trail.

Batiuk told me the trail team wants to add more features in the future: a printed map, additional website photos and videos, QR codes anglers can scan at each site to access the website’s detailed information and perhaps a “passport” that fly fishers could have stamped for every site they visit. “Maryland is small enough, geographically, that you could realistically do them all in one year,” he says of the 48 sites.

I’ve had my passport theoretically stamped at several trail waterways. I caught my first trout, a small brookie, on Big Hunting Creek, pausing to marvel at this silken, vivid thing in my hand before letting it go. I remember a blue heron watching from a nearby tree to see whether I caught anything worthwhile at Morgan Run. (Both of us were disappointed.) And I also got a lesson in spey casting—using both hands to cast a fly rod that, I swear, rivaled a telephone pole in length—at Thomas Point.

I haven’t fly fished for some years now, time and age having drifted us apart. But after listening to Batiuk,

AMY HOLSTEIN

Left: Fly fishing at Gunpowder Falls.

Below: Kayak fly fisher on the tannic water of the upper Pocomoke River.

RICH BATIUK

I’m ready to renew my acquaintance. I could start with a refresher course from one of the instructors listed on the trail website, or at a fly-fishing club clinic.

“Within a two- or three-hour casting clinic we’re able to get people getting the motion,” Batiuk says. “Get them out on the water a few times and they’ve got enough skill to do it.”

Fly fishing may soon reach underserved urban communities as part of DNR’s mobile fishing outreach program. Its First Catch Center trailer provides urban residents with fishing lessons and loaner tackle. “We’re hoping that maybe in the future we’ll do fly fishing,” says DNR’s Letha Grimes, who runs the program.

Batiuk says individual fly fishers are eager to help novices as well. “They have a tendency to want to teach and to share,” offering advice and sometimes even flies to newbies. “In fly-fishing, you’re not just casting a bobber in there or casting a lure, it’s the whole experience of getting into the environment. We always want to share that.”

The Fly Fishing Trail website lists tackle and fly shops that sell rods, flies and assorted basics such as waders, boots and vests. Most retailers, even high-end ones like Orvis and Patagonia, offer starter tackle kits at non-bespoke prices.

“You can be simple, or you can be like me; I’ve got rods from weight three to weight twelve,” says Batiuk, who was making his own fly rods as a high schooler. “What we don’t want to do is make [fly fishing] too complicated and scare people away. But if they’re interested and do want to do something different, they can have a lifetime blast with it.”

Maryland native and award-winning contributor Marty LeGrand writes about nature, the environment and Chesapeake history.

Scan this QR code to access Maryland’s Fly Fishing Trail online: There you’ll find a list of sites in each of Maryland’s 23 counties and Baltimore City, organized into regions to help you plan your fishing excursions.

CENTRAL REGION

In the Central Region, you might want to try hooking hickory shad on Deer Creek, which flows through Harford County to meet the Susquehanna River below Conowingo Dam. You can find a campsite for your tent or RV at Susquehanna State Park or posh accommodations in nearby Havre de Grace. Reserve a campsite at a Maryland state park at www.parkreservations.maryland.gov.

Accommodations in Havre de Grace can be found at visitharford.com.

EASTERN SHORE

One of the prettiest sites listed is Turner’s Creek on the lower Sassafras River. This tidal creek’s waters hold bluegill, crappie, channel catfish, largemouth bass, striped bass, white catfish, white perch, yellow perch, chain pickerel, northern snakehead, and blue catfish. You can find accommodations in nearby Chestertown at www.kentcounty.com.

CAPITAL REGION

The marshes of Jug Bay on the tidal portion of the Patuxent River flowing through Prince George’s County have a wide variety of fish that readily strike at fishing flies. It’s just a half-hour drive from Annapolis; find a place to stay at visitannapolis.org.

SOUTHERN MARYLAND

Go for the blue catfish, bluegill, crappie, largemouth bass, striped bass, channel catfish, white catfish, striped bass, white perch, yellow perch, carp and northern snakehead that swarm around the graveyard of sunken wooden ships at the National Marine Sanctuary at Mallows Bay on the Potomac River. The town of La Plata is about a half hour drive away from this remote site. Look for accommodations at www.explorecharlescounty.com.

Our premier slips, conveniently situated on the prime cruising grounds of the Chesapeake Bay, offer you access to a wide array of amenities, services and experiences. Book your 2023 dockage today at HAVENHARBOUR.COM.

PartyAnimals

BY KATE LIVIE

The first time I ever saw an otter in real life, it scared me so much I almost fell out of my kayak. It was a summer morning on Morgan Creek, off the Chester River, and I had gone out for an early paddle before it got too hot. I had my camera around my neck, and I’d stopped to take a few shots of blue damselflies on stalks of pickerelweed. Just beside my kayak, a huge brown head silently emerged from the creek. I struggled to identify this annoyed-looking creature—Muskrat? No. Beaver? No…. Otter? Yes!

The otter and I looked at each other, almost eye to eye. This was no sweet little YouTube otter, juggling clams or cuddling pups. This otter was a bruiser. It could have easily chased my dog off its food bowl. “Chuff! Chuff!” The otter loudly told me off

and I briefly feared for my life. We regarded one another for a while, then it turned and plunged back into the water. I sat for a minute with my mouth hanging open, frozen, until my heart started beating again. Finally I gathered my wits and paddled away, amazed, startled, and totally hoping to see it again.

Otter encounters like this are rare in the Chesapeake—so rare that avid boaters and kayakers can go a lifetime without seeing an otter in the wild. Otters are nocturnal and notoriously reclusive, preferring nighttime for socializing and hunting. Though they might build a den in a relatively populous human area, they often go undetected.

While glimpses of otters are rare, the North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) is not. A semiaquatic

member of the weasel family, otters are social creatures that can weigh up to 30 pounds, burrow in the soft soil along waterways, and prey on fish, frogs and clams. Today listed as a species “of least concern,” otter populations have recovered since the 17th and 18th centuries, when they were trapped to meet the European demand for otter fur.

A 1696 ledger in the Maryland State Archives shows that otter furs were used as a kind of barter currency. Otter furs, along with mink, raccoon, wolf, bear, muskrat and deer pelts, were valued at three pence per skin levied against

Glimpses of otters are rare, but the North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) is not.

MATTHEW FRYER

taxes in the “Patuxent District.” Thankfully, the craze for American fur dwindled in the late 19th century as it fell out of fashion. Since then, otter populations have been largely left to their own devices. Yet, in the passing centuries, very little information on them has been gathered at all beyond the occasional glimpse.

Dr. Katrina Lohan at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland is hoping to change that. A specialist in marine disease and parasite ecology, her research has recently taken an unexpected turn toward otters. A colleague in the education department at SERC had observed some strange droppings on a waterfront dock. “It looked more like a splat than a log,” Lohan explains. “When she got closer, she realized it was full of fish scales and live worms. That’s when she called me.”

With the help of a trail cam, Lohan and her colleague discovered that a group of otters had been visiting the dock regularly, eating fish, playing, and, well, pooping. “We started calling them ‘poop parties.’ It was very much social behavior. The otters would gather on the dock, wrestle and eat, and then do these little dances,” says Lohan. “Pooping was part of their communication and socialization.”

As an expert in parasite ecology, Lohan is no stranger to scat. To get to

the parasites, you need to go to the source. But typically, she explained, most species isolate the places where they eat from the places where they defecate. Otters, however, poop in the same communal spot on shore where they feed and socialize as well. These spots are called “latrines.”

“Part of the reason I’m so excited about them is that otters break all the rules when it comes to parasite transmission” she says. “Otters basically eat, mate and play in their bathrooms.”

This unique behavior results in a lot of parasites—and for Lohan, that means a lot of information about not only the otters, but also the fish they were eating and the health of the river in general. Otters are apex predators, and their scat carries zoonotic diseases that impact both wildlife and people. If otters become infected with parasites from a certain kind of fish, it’s possible for humans to get parasites from that kind of fish, too. By studying SERC’s river otters and looking at the DNA in their scat, Lohan and her team can learn about the other animals and parasites that live in the same watershed.

“It’s an easy way to learn what pathogens are present in our food sources,” Lohan explains. “We can test it for genetics to understand what was in that meal, and the prior meal of the meal.”

Lohan’s team found 11 otter latrines on the SERC property on the Rhode River south of Annapolis. As they collected data on otter scat and observed the animals’ behavior, Lohan started her own background research into otters. She quickly discovered how sparse the data was on Chesapeake otters.

“We realized that there’s very little known on the biology and ecology of river otters in the Chesapeake Bay,” Lohan says. “They’ve been here a long time, but that’s basically all we know about them. There’s not a single scientific peer-reviewed paper on otter in the entire Chesapeake watershed.”

Because of Lohan’s parasite research, she and her team were unintentionally gathering new information on otter behavior, too. They brought in more game cameras and teamed up with an animal behaviorist.

As the study went through a new round of funding, the range of focus expanded beyond the SERC campus into broader waters across Maryland, including urban areas. But this presented a new challenge—how to find otters in these different waterways? “We don’t know much about their population structure, what they’re eating or what parasites or diseases are impacting them here,” Lohan says. “Once you find their latrines, you can learn so much about

There’s very little known on the biology and ecology of river otters in the Chesapeake Bay.

them, but the first question is ‘where do you go?’ So we created this citizenscience approach to focus our efforts, knowing that people in the watershed were monitoring otters on their own.”

Lohan’s first step was to reach out to different public entities and environmental groups—national, state and county parks and educational nonprofits—that had been tracking otters individually. What she turned up was surprising. Otters have been spotted in the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. and in the Anacostia River. They’ve been reported in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and some were even accused of eating $10,000 worth of prized koi in Maryland. The otter’s range, it seemed, was expanding. But as they returned to regional waterways, they were met with some fuzzy unfamiliarity.

“One of my favorite stories came from a biologist at the U.S. Department of Energy and Environment,” Lohan recalls. “The reason we knew otters were back in the District (of Columbia) is because someone brought in a carcass and said, ‘Oh my god, we just found the biggest rat I’ve seen in my life. What is that?’ It turned out to be the first otter spotted in D.C. in more than 40 years.”

The greater public has been invited to get in on the otter party. Lohan and her team have put out a call for

citizens to report otter activity and latrines. Guides are posted on SERC’s social media and website that identify distinctive signs of otter activity, like paw prints, tracks in marshes, scraped up soil, and of course, their splats of scat with a strong fishy smell. Otter spotters are encouraged to inspect docks and things that stick up out of the water, and to upload information about their location, including photos and video to the SERC website so the team can follow up.

To participate in SERC’s otter study and join in the party, scan this QR code:

or check out the SERC Facebook page for more information. The data from citizen scientists is currently being collected and quantified. Submit your otter sighting, and download a helpful field guide for tips on otter scat, tracks, path and activity identification.

Scat on a picnic table at Franklin Point in Shady Side, Md.

The response has been strong. Lohan found that a lot of people had been tracking otters on their own. Otter behavior continued to surprise the team. One citizen scientist reported (with photos) an otter latrine on a backyard picnic table. Reports have flowed in of otters on docks, otters in gardens, otters on boats. It helps, Lohan admits, that otters work quite nicely as a scientific mascot.

“It’s been really exciting to see how much people are really interested in this and want to participate,” Lohan says. “Otters are so charismatic and cute, people are naturally interested in them. The energy around this project is palpable.”

Lohan laughs when asked how she feels about becoming known as the “otter lady.” “Well, normally people pull a face when I tell them I study parasites,” she says. “But then I say I

study the parasites of otters, and it goes from ‘ewww’ to ‘oh!”

SOLARA

Otters are so charismatic and cute, people are naturally interested in them.

MATTHEW FRYER

Kate Livie is a Chesapeake writer, educator and historian. An Eastern Shore native and current faculty at Washington College’s Center for Environment and Society, Livie’s award-winning book, Chesapeake Oysters, was published in 2015.

Chesapeake Sleigh Rides

by Capt. John Page Williams

Spring comes inexorably but slowly from March into April. Early spawners like hickory shad make their way up the Chesapeake’s rivers, and rockfish stage near their spawning grounds. Crabs wake from their slumber and slowly begin to forage. From mid-April into May, though, the lower Chesapeake explodes not just with spawners but also with eaters. One of the most remarkable groups of eaters to emerge over the past 20 years is the big “bull” redfish, which comes into our waters from their wintering grounds on the continental shelf off North Carolina. Also known as red drum, these amazing creatures can grow to a length of 40 to 55 inches.

For four weeks or so, shallow flats with southeast exposure along the seaside beaches just outside both Virginia capes and along the Bay’s lower western shore from Hampton all the way up to the Rappahannock offer these fish two resources they need: warm water to raise their body temperatures and abundant food to stoke their rising metabolisms. Powerfully built with broad tails, heavy shoulders, underslung mouths and crusher plates in their throats, these drum are well equipped as opportunistic predators with keen appetites for fish, mollusks and crustaceans.

Those miles and miles of flats provide sandy bottoms with clams and, especially at this season, eelgrass beds crawling with crabs getting ready to slough their shells for the first time this year. That’s right: like their cousins the speckled trout, these big

red drum are coming into the Bay for the “Peeler Run.” They’ll root up anything they find in the sand and grass (including even sand dollars, according to one veteran of the fishery), but rank (ripe) peelers and fresh soft crabs are their haute cuisine.

This bonanza comes as water temperatures at the Bay’s mouth reach 60 degrees. According to NOAA’s First Landing Buoy, that event comes around April 30, plus-or-minus 10 days. It will last about four weeks, according to past history, as reflected in the Red Drum Citations awarded by the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament. After that, the drum begin to disperse to summertime haunts all over the Bay. Savvy anglers plan accordingly, reserving time and trying to remain flexible around both

the rate at which the water warms and the fickle spring weather on these broad and sometimes treacherous seas.

Finding the fish, as always, is a blend of art, science and technology. Homework ahead of time is the first order of business, informed by an understanding of what the fish need, chart study, and thoughtful research on anglers’ success in past seasons. Discussion within a close-mouthed network of like-minded friends is always valuable, too. Once on the

Angler Bob Lepczyk caught this red drum on a Hogy Pro Tail Paddle Swim Bait. The fish was approximately 48 inches and 46 pounds, and was caught and released on the flats of the Virginia's Eastern Shore.

KEVIN JOSENHANS

water, the distinctive bronze-colored water the schools create, “pushes” of water as the big fish move shallow together, trails of suspended sand as the fish root in the bottom, and even a watermelon smell hanging over a school (according to one prominent angler). In the last few years, anglers with a bent for gear have begun to rely on side-scan sonar, which returns strong signals from the drums’ big air bladders, and elevated towers on large skiffs for better spotting of schools.

That said, one of the most experienced groups of anglers is the kayakers, some of the best of whom eschew sonar but delight in capturing their drum encounters on rollicking videos, often shot with cameras mounted on each end of the vessels. The most prominent member of this crew is “Kayak Kevin” Whitely, an animated, versatile Master Angler who became the first to achieve that rating from the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament while fishing solely in kayaks. Subscribe to his YouTube page to watch short videos of the full range of his fish obsession, from Appomattox River smallmouths to springtime red drum. He loves to be next to the water, and the stealth of his little boat allows him to get close to the fish.

The videos show how he and his friends handle big drum, casting and

sometimes paddle-trolling on the flats with stout-hooked jigs carrying large soft plastic shad tails or setting cut baits (whole peeler or hard crabs) on circle hook fishfinder rigs in the adjacent sloughs. They employ 6-foot6-inch, heavy-action muskie rods mounting strong baitcasting reels spooled with 65-pound-test braided line and 80-pound-test leaders. Note, by the way, that this is no game for a novice paddler. The water is big, and the currents are decidedly more powerful than the fish. That said, the thrill lies in the “Kayak Sleigh Ride” as a big drum tows the craft and angler at speeds emulating whitewater rapids.

The effort of fighting heavy tackle and the sleigh ride towing ensure a short fight without completely exhausting the fish, which is important because the angler must release it afterward. Along the Atlantic coast, red drum are subject to a harvest “slot limit” that protects large, breeding drum, which can live for up to 60 years. Virginia’s slot, 18 to 26 inches, has been in effect for more than 20 years. The fish are subject to harvest for only about 18 months during those long lives. That protection is a major reason why the Mid-Atlantic stock of red drum, which the Chesapeake shares with North

Carolina, has grown so strong in recent years. In this springtime fishery, the water is cool and well oxygenated, and the fish are hardy. The kayakers’ careful catch-and-release procedure involves using an arm and a leg to slide a fish into the low-sided boat, carefully supporting its body horizontally while measuring and sometimes tagging it, sliding it back overboard, and holding it upright by the tail to allow it to recover enough to swim away.

The kayak fishery is spectacular, but not everyone is able to participate. A number of anglers employ shallowdraft, 16- to 26-foot outboard skiffs, which gives them the ability to scout much larger areas in search of the drum, especially along the Bay’s Western Shore. Word gets around, and a few well-known places actually become uncomfortably crowded (for both anglers and fish), while the savvier guides and private skippers find their own spots.

One of the most established guides, Capt. Tyler Nonn of Tidewater Charters, is based out of Cape Charles but actually spends more time across the Bay, scouting carefully and keeping in touch with a few trusted confidants. Like Kevin Whitely and his friends, Nonn uses heavy tackle to keep the drum fights short: heavyaction spinning rods with large (6000to 8000-class) reels with smooth drags,

Left: Trey Spear and the approximately 49-inch, 50-pound red drum he caught and released on the flats of Virginia's Eastern Shore.

KEVIN JOSENHANS

Right: Greg Holsey with his red drum caught and released on the flats of Virginia's Eastern Shore. The fish was approximately 46 inches and 42 pounds.

40-pound test braid, 50-pound test leaders, sharp jigs, and “tough” softplastic tails (he favors Z-Man and Hogy paddletails). The big drum can pull even his 26-foot skiff around, which again keeps the fights short. He, too, strives to handle the fish carefully, supporting their bodies with a large, soft net and leaning over the side of the boat to revive them during release. In addition to casting jigs, Nonn notes that he also sees a few “old-timers” employing a long-time red drum technique, trolling large spoons on long lines with little weight around the edges of the flats.

The spring fishery on the flats lasts only a few weeks before the big drum disperse up the Chesapeake, swimming regularly as far north as the mouth of the Choptank to provide more exciting catch-and-release action for anglers in both Virginia and Maryland before they head back to the

ocean in October. The number of red drum release citations (for fish 46 inches or longer) issued by Virginia has grown to extraordinary proportions, 1,286 in 2021 and 1,086 in 2022. The big fish have become an important management success story, with three states (Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland) cooperating on their shared stock and anglers delighting in the encounters with them.

One friend from Annapolis, Crae Ramsey, fishes these shallow-water red drum with a Maryland guide who comes down to Virginia for a couple of weeks each spring. Crae now has several Virginia red drum citations to his credit. “It was obvious to me,” he says, summing up his feelings about these fish, “that rockfish were in trouble, and that the Maryland

springtime Trophy Season can kill some. These red drum offer a great alternative. I love fishing a new area. It’s a great light tackle fishery with low release mortality, even though the weather requires prudence and patience. I can’t wait for May again this year.”

Editor-at-Large John Page Williams is a fishing guide, educator, author and naturalist, saving the Bay since 1973.

Right: 'Kayak Kevin' Whitely, who was the first to achieve the rating of Master Angler from the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament while fishing solely in kayaks.

RIC BURNLEY

KEVIN JOSENHANS

TheWicked Problem

Abandoned fiberglass boats never fade away.

BY KELSEY BONHAM

Dan Corder, a retired firefighter on Virginia’s Northern Neck, is giving abandoned boats a second chance by transforming them into pirate-themed spectacles. His eclectic hobby started when his neighbor was planning to get rid of a boat that “sank more than it floated,” and Corder offered to take it instead. “I towed it over to my dock and that evening, after I think my third bourbon, I looked at it and I said, you know what, we can put some lipstick on a pig here… I literally turned this thing into the most gaudy-looking pirate ship that you have ever seen,” he says. That first project became such a legend that someone offered him $10,000 for it.

Left: One of Dan Corder’s infamous pirate ship transformations.

Right: An abandoned and capsized powerboat tied up at a dock in Hampton Roads. Courtesy of the Vessel Disposal and Reuse Foundation.

Below: An abandoned fiberglass sailboat being removed by barge and crane. Courtesy of the Vessel Disposal and Reuse Foundation.

Corder, currently working on his 33rd pirate ship, has sold his transformed boats to nonprofits, charters, and even Disney, although money isn’t his motivation. “Usually if I’m lucky I will break even,” he explains. “I just hate to see these things end up in the landfill.”

It may be difficult for non-boaters to imagine allowing a boat to deteriorate extensively or abandoning it altogether. Boat owners, however, usually understand how it happens. Corder compares boat ownership to relationships: “It’s enchanting, and then reality sets in.”

Maintenance is no joke, and catching up on missed maintenance is even harder—it usually takes Corder a year to revitalize each of his pirate ships. I restored an essentially abandoned boat a few years ago, and that took a year and the equivalent of

a semester of college tuition. Even then, the only reason my boat could be revived at all is because she’s steel, so the hull was still sound. Most recreational boats are fiberglass.

Large-scale production of fiberglass boats took off in the 1960s and 70s. They’re cheap and efficient to produce, have an excellent strength to weight ratio, and are much easier to maintain than wood. But stress cracking can develop around critical points, and many fiberglass boats have balsa wood-cored decks that will rot if water intrudes. Even the best maintained fiberglass boats often degrade beyond reasonable repair after 40 or 50 years. Since the first wave of fiberglass boats was produced about 50 years ago, their time is up.

Unlike cars and other vehicles made of metal that can be scrapped, fiberglass is not recyclable. Its strength

comes from its structure and long fibers, so it can’t be crushed up and reformed into something new without losing all its desirable qualities. Although there are efforts to burn crushed fiberglass as an alternative fuel for cement production, these programs are still in the pilot phases. Because the value can’t be recouped, it currently costs more to dispose of an old fiberglass boat than the boat is worth. Considering hazardous materials, demolition and landfill fees, owners of older vessels might seek alternative, and often illegal, disposal options. “Unfortunately,” says Corder, “what happens down here a lot, is the unwilling victim ends up being the marina” where the boat got left behind.

LaNika Jackson, manager of Willoughby Harbor Marina in Norfolk, reports that abandoned

KELSEY BONHAM

Above: A sailboat believed to be abandoned, anchored near Hospital Point, Portsmouth, in the middle of a regatta course.

Below:

vessels have been problematic for them. Sometimes customers will bring boats in, pay the initial slip fees, and vanish. “It’s a pain,” she adds. “There’s no way for marinas to actually go after the customer and have them take responsibility… half the time the boat in question is not even registered to the person who we last knew to own the boat, it’s registered to someone four owners ago.” Besides being a logistical challenge, the expense also falls on the marina: “Depending on who you contract with, it can cost anywhere between $70 per foot up to $150 per foot to get the boat removed from the marina and disposed of,”

Jackson says. “That’s money that we could be using to make improvements in other areas of the marina, but instead we have to use it to remove a boat that we don’t even own.”

Some boats are left in marinas like Willoughby Harbor. Others are blown out to sea by rough weather and aren’t sought after by their owners, while others sink in their slips due to lack of maintenance. Some are set adrift, deliberately sunk, or tied up in a remote marsh, often with registrations removed. Regardless of where a boat is abandoned or where it ends up, it becomes marine debris, and a hazard to people and the environment.

Robin Dunbar, director of education at the Elizabeth River Project and a PhD student focusing on marine debris, says that the materials from abandoned boats can entangle or be ingested by animals, damage habitat, and pose a hazard to

navigation. “If something becomes abandoned or adrift, it ends up smothering the wetlands, or damaging them, or crushing bird nests.” They may also leak contaminants, such as fuel, oil, paints, and sewage, and become a source of microplastics, since fiberglass is a plastic composite. Boaters might collide with submerged vessels they can’t see, and stray lines from rigging or fishing gear may foul propellers, endangering those aboard. Given these threats, many coastal states have programs to deal with what

Right: A sailboat at Point Lookout Marina in southern Maryland that had fallen off its stands; its tab hadn’t been paid in multiple years.

A sailboat at Willoughby Harbor Marina that isn’t currently abandoned, but was bought by someone as salvage (it had previously been sunk; you can see barnacles on deck).

KELSEY BONHAM

never fade away

they call ADVs, or Abandoned and Derelict Vessels. In Maryland, the Department of Natural Resources is authorized to remove ADVs, and funding is provided by the Waterway Improvement Fund through taxes on the sale and registration of boats.

In Virginia, it’s a different story. The Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC) is the only state entity with the authority to remove ADVs, but they have never had any funding to do so, as Mike Provost discovered in late 2021. While boating with his kids in Virginia Beach, they encountered a 35-foot powerboat tied to a tree. After promising his kids he’d ensure it was cleaned up, Provost called around for months seeking state assistance, to no avail. “The sentiment was, ‘Hey, thanks for calling, this is really important, however I don’t have the money to do anything about it, if you want something done you’ll have to do it yourself,’” says Provost. “So I...started a GoFundMe … and we raised $11,000,

and that was just enough to cover our costs.” He hired someone to tow it to a ramp, and then “we literally just went out there with axes and chainsaws and demoed this thing in the parking lot, threw it into dumpsters, and then took it to a dump.”

After that first boat, Provost started the Vessel Disposal and Reuse Foundation. “We’re the nonparticipatory fundraising entity. I have relationships with a couple of really down-to-earth people who own marine salvage companies, and they give VDRF the nonprofit rate,” Provost says. So far, VDRF has removed 17 abandoned boats in the Hampton Roads area.

Although abandoning a vessel is a misdemeanor in Virginia, Provost feels that the punishment is misguided. “In my experience, the people that create ADVs fall into five categories. They are typically elderly, have a fixed income or have had a change in their wealth, are physically handicapped, mentally

ill, or they’re addicted to substances,” Provost says. “They’re at-risk individuals. They’re not some wealthy guy who’s just trying to be a jerk.”

Even if the law is enforced, which it rarely is, “Just because they send someone to jail doesn’t mean they’re going to clean up the boat.” Provost believes a vessel turn-in program that allows boatowners seeking affordable disposal options to surrender their boat to the state would be more appropriate than punishment, save millions in removal costs, and prevent untold environmental damage. He has started a petition to establish one.

Despite Provost’s experiences with state officials, Virginia has come closer to solving the problem of ADVs. In June 2022, the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program released a report by its Abandoned & Derelict Vessels Work Group. The report detailed years of work by state officials and stakeholders to better understand the issue, and made several policy recommendations, including that the state legislature budget $3 million to the VMRC for abandoned vessel removal. The $3 million was approved, marking the first time the VMRC has ever had funding to achieve its mandate.

Now the work group is collaborating with the VMRC to create an equitable, transparent mechanism to remove abandoned boats throughout Virginia. “You’re constantly balancing speed versus getting it done right,” says Jefferson Flood, a co-author of the report.

Left: An abandoned and sunken trawler in Hampton Roads. Courtesy of the Vessel Disposal and Reuse Foundation.

VESSEL DISPOSAL AND REUSE FOUNDATION/ MIKE PROVOST

According to Flood, the first step is removing the highest-priority boats, “the ones that are actively a threat to the environment in the water, in a marsh, leaking fuel, that someone could strike at night.” The work group identified approximately 230 known ADVs in Virginia, but “we know that they are so under-reported, and there are probably a ton on private property. So maybe you have twenty more, maybe you have a hundred,” Flood explains. “I would say the plurality, probably 25 to 30 percent of all these vessels, are in southside Hampton Roads. The next biggest concentration is probably on the Middle Peninsula, the Piankatank, Mobjack.” These hotspots, and those vessels in the worst condition, will likely be the first to be targeted by the VMRC.

Abandoned boats can be hazardous to the environment as well as navigation.

Flood says that they’re still working on what to do after the $3 million runs out to create a robust system for the long term. The work group determined that increasing taxes on boat sales and registrations, as is the case in Maryland, is not politically feasible. “Everyone benefits from cleaner waters and safety of navigation, even if they’re not a boater,” Flood says, so they don’t want to disproportionately tax boaters when only a tiny percentage of them contribute to the problem.

In Virginia, scan this QR code to report abandoned vessels:

In Maryland, report abandoned vessels to the Natural Resources Police at 410-260-8888.

Nationwide, if you see a sunken vessel leaking fuel or other pollutants, or if you see an oil slick or smell the odor of spilled fuel, call the National Response Center at 800-424-8802.

Regarding the possibility of a vessel turn-in program, Flood explains that the work group sees it as an option down the road.

“If we demonstrate that the money was well spent, then you’re going to probably see a request for more funding to turn off the faucet by having a vessel turn-in program.”

Abandoned vessels are a complex problem. Robin Dunbar from the

Elizabeth River Project went so far as to describe them as a “wicked problem,” a policy term used to describe social dilemmas that have no singular solution and defy standard approaches. “It seems so simple to say, ‘I want this boat out of my backyard,’” Flood adds, and yet, “It is like layers of an onion. You’re peeling them back, and you find out even more stuff that you don’t know.” But the layers are being peeled back. Creatives like Corder are keeping boats out of the landfill, community leaders like Provost are raising awareness and pulling boats from the water, and the state mechanism is in motion to create sustainable change. The problem won’t be solved overnight, not without more effective ways to recycle fiberglass or alternative boatbuilding materials, but for the first time in Virginia’s history, there may be fewer abandoned boats littering waterways a decade from now than there were a decade ago.

Kelsey Bonham is a 2022 graduate of Colgate University with a bachelor’s in Environmental Geography, and is currently based in Norfolk, Va. When not writing or sailing, she is an environmental educator with the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center.

Right: Dan Corder and friends with one of Corder’s salvaged pirate ships.

Bay Adventurer Explores the Arctic

Matt Rutherford beats the odds.

by Angus Phillips

"Fortitudine Vincimus"

(By Endurance We Conquer)

sailors. It was a raw boat and raw crew, but the Arctic clock was ticking.

—Family motto of Sir Ernest Shackleton and Matt

Rutherford

Things rarely go smoothly for Matt Rutherford, the Chesapeake’s foremost seagoing adventurer. Where he goes, hardship and tribulation follow, so it was no surprise when obstacles started popping up last summer on his latest foray to the Artic Ocean. His scientific voyage to Greenland was a shakedown cruise from hell; only persistence saw him through.

Delays in launching left no time for sea trials before leaving Annapolis in the 50-ton, 70-foot steel ketch he’d spent three years reshaping into a research vessel. The goal: three and a half months of climate and geological research with a team of scientists and

When they finally left in June, three weeks late, whatever could go wrong did, from engine failure to gear failure to disease, icebergs, storms, injuries and more. The cascade of problems might have stopped a lesser skipper, but Rutherford has a history.

Locals know him as the gingerhaired 30-year-old from Ohio who set off a decade ago to sail around the Americas in a 40-year-old, 27-foot sailboat. That trip began and ended in Annapolis, 309 days, 27,077 miles from Atlantic to Pacific and back via the Northwest Passage and Cape Horn, nonstop, singlehanded. He lived on freeze-dried food and fresh water made from the sea with a hand-pump.

His mission on returning was to use his newfound prominence to build a nonprofit organization dedicated to

marine research. Flying the flag of his newly formed Ocean Research Project, he completed trips in undersized boats across the Atlantic and Pacific, collecting and reporting on plastic pollution.

In 2019, he wrangled the donation of a 20-year-old, unfinished steel hulk that was rusting away in the C&D Canal. Today, thanks to his efforts, the refurbished Marie Tharp, named for a little-known 20th-century pioneer in ocean mapping, is now a fully outfitted research vessel with room for eight in tidy cabins finished in polished cherry. It even has a sauna.

He and his science partner, Nicole Trenholm, won a grant to explore fjords along the Greenland coast for Seabed 2030, an international effort to map all remaining uncharted waters in the world. They also would study glacial melting and its impact on the environment.

By the time he launched in late May, Rutherford, now 41, was already behind schedule. Trouble came on the first day of testing in the Chesapeake: under power at anything over 5 knots, the hull shook alarmingly—the drive shaft was out of whack and a haul-out was required.

At the height of spring launch season, no one wanted to pull and block a 50-ton behemoth. It took a week before Rod Jabin at Jabin’s Yard relented. Marie Tharp was then anchored in Annapolis Harbor amid 1,000 boats gathered to watch the Navy Blue Angels air show. “Rod said he’d haul us if we could get there in 20 minutes. It was chaos, winding through the jammed anchorage with limited steering and power. Then the bow-thrusters quit.” Somehow he got in with minutes to spare.

After a week testing bearings, fittings and tolerances in blistering heat, the shimmy was corrected enough to forge up the Bay, through the C&D Canal and down Delaware Bay at 6 to 8 knots. Once in the ocean, in steadier winds, Rutherford reckoned he’d make up time under sail.

And that he did, if only briefly. Blasting along in 25 knots of wind 200 miles off Long Island, “I hear this loud clunk,” Rutherford recalled. He jumped from his bunk, rushed below and found the rudder shaft banging around in its housing, its bearings shot. Many a faulty rudder has sunk a ship. Time for another haul-out, but where?

“We called everyone from Norfolk to Boston. Nobody wanted to do it.” Finally New England Boatworks in

Narragansett Bay agreed, and Marie Tharp struck a course for Portsmouth, R.I., and another 10 days on land removing the 300-pound rudder, installing new bearings and addressing engine and generator malfunctions.

Back at sea, surging toward Greenland, Rutherford watched in horror as the sophisticated transducer used to sound the sea floor for mapping died. You can’t map without a transducer and you can’t replace a transducer without hauling. The only place he could find willing was in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. They arrived in a 30-knot tempest to find two men and a tired, undersized travel lift waiting, “and one guy never took his hands out of his pockets,” Rutherford recalled.

The hoist on the overmatched lift was nerve-wracking, but the fix was made and launch was scheduled next morning. Locals invited the crew to a firepit party. Rutherford was worn out and went to bed. First mate Nick Radtka shook him awake a few hours later to report a crewmember had fallen nine feet off a seawall during the festivities and broken her arm in three places. They got her to a hospital and after another delay were off again, now shorthanded.

That night, bound for Greenland, one of the two remaining deckhands announced he wasn’t feeling well; then Trenholm, the lead scientist, said she

wasn’t either. By morning, Rutherford was clammy and sweaty. Radtka took his temperature: 104.

“COVID,” said Rutherford. “I just curled up in my bunk,” where he remained in misery and quarantine for five days. Fortunately, sailing conditions were good. He kept track of progress on his laptop, phoning corrections up to the bridge. By the time they reached Paamiut on Greenland’s east coast, he was back on his feet.

There they collected a crew of scientists and set off on their mission, mapping fjords and dropping probes to measure glacial melting. Things went well until a distracted helmsman smashed into an ice chunk “the size of a Cadillac Escalade,” according to Rutherford. The bergy bit rolled under the hull and twisted the propeller into a pretzel.

That dropped top speed to a shaky 3–4 knots, which is how they mapped and measured until arriving in Nuuk three weeks later, where they could haul on a marine railway. The locals there hammered the prop back into crude but usable shape and the cruise resumed. 

Left: Marie Tharp, the 50-ton steel sailboat Matt Rutherford resurrected at Herrington Harbor North, works up a typical, ice-choked Greenland fjord.

PHINEAS ALEXANDER

Matt Rutherford (left) and Nicole Trenholm drop a probe from Marie Tharp ’s convenient tailgate.

Through it all, Rutherford stayed calm, as a captain must. Radtka, the first mate, was a mixed martial arts cage-fighter in his younger days, then trained other cage fighters. “I have known a lot of really tough people,” he said, “but I never met anyone as mentally tough as Matt. There were times I was surprised he didn’t just jump off the boat.”

Despite the late start and setbacks, research was finished just two weeks later than scheduled. The weary travelers set off for home in October, mission accomplished. Celebrations were cut short when halfway to Newfoundland, Hurricane Fiona spun up, heading much farther north than most hurricanes go—straight at the Marie Tharp.

Rutherford found a hurricane hole on the northwest tip of Newfoundland, rafted up to some moored shrimp boats and waited out the blow. Then, skirting the edge of Hurricane Ian, he made it back to Annapolis by boat show time, where he kept busy giving talks and lining up sponsors for next year’s expected return for more Arctic research.

After a decade and more of shorthanded, underfunded sea voyages, Rutherford says his key to preparation is “blind optimism,” and the key to success is “determination and perseverance.” Somehow, like his hero Shackleton, who kept his crew alive for months in the Antarctic after their ship was crushed by ice a century ago, he manages to keep his head when all around him is falling to ruin.

Follow Matt Rutherford’s adventures on www.oceanresearchproject.org; or listen to his entertaining podcast, “Singlehanded Sailor.”

Angus Phillips was outdoor editor of The Washington Post for 35 years, covering the fishing, hunting and boating scene both locally and globally. He’s lived in Annapolis since 1983.

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TIMELESSLY Tochterman’s

Three Generations of Baltimore’s First Family of Tackle Keeps it Old School

BY MARTY LEGRAND

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

To anglers, the spotlit window displays at Tochterman’s, Baltimore’s seemingly ageless tackle shop, glow like a toy store at Christmas whatever the season. On this autumn day, one window features T-shirts depicting trophy-esque bass and billfish, a long-handled landing net and pint-sized rod and reel combos for youngsters. In the opposite display, a pair of disembodied chest waders presides over an impressive array of fly-fishing gear.

And that’s just merchandise visible from the sidewalk. Inside, to paraphrase a devoted customer, you

need a GPS to navigate two floors of inventory deployed at maximum density and diversity. From tiny sinkers to towering saltwater rods, from feathers for fly-tying to fish coolers for icing flounder, the profusion of gear stems from a business philosophy preached by generations of Tochtermans: Selection, selection, selection.

“Don’t just sell them what you’ve got,” explains Tony Tochterman, who owns the store with his wife, Dee. “That’s the problem with most stores today. They have the most popular items because that’s the most

profitable. That’s great to make money, but that’s not taking care of your customers. That’s where Dad taught me [the importance of] selection.”

“Dad” would be Thomas “Tommy” Tochterman Jr., the blunt-speaking, silver-haired businessman who ran the family store with a firm hand and a gentle heart for 60 years until his death in 1998. His philosophies on merchandising and customer service survive in the persons of his son and beloved daughter-in-law, who strive to uphold the motto: “If Tochterman’s doesn’t have it, you don’t need it.”

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

Corporeally, Tommy Tochterman has never really left; his ashes, and those of his wife, Antoinette (known as Toni), reside in mini-length rod cases in a first-floor display cabinet. Tony often speaks to his father; at least once, Dad apparently answered (more on that later).

Tochterman’s sits in the same modest urban neighborhood where Tony’s grandfather (Tommy’s father) launched the business on a cobblestone street more than a century ago. It’s reputedly the nation’s oldest family-run tackle shop still operating in its original location. Even competitors would have to concede it’s one of a kind.

Thomas George Tochtermann Sr. was a Baltimore seafood market worker and part-time entrepreneur. When his employer suggested he take home about-to-perish peelers and soft crabs on weekends—when the market was closed—he decided to start a brick-and-mortar business. On February 8, 1916, he and his wife,

Anna, opened a bait and sundries shop on the first floor of their Fells Point row house. They sold the basics: the leftover crabs as fish bait, plus candy, cigarettes and Anna’s homemade crabcakes and codfish cakes to entice fishermen.

Within a few years, as the world went to war, the Tochtermanns shortened their surname (one “n” sounded less Germanic in World War I) and expanded their inventory. In addition to bait, the couple—aided by young Tommy and his kid brother Eddie—offered bamboo poles, handtied fishing rigs and sinkers made inhouse using wooden molds. Anglers riding the trolley hopped off at 1925 Eastern Avenue, bought bait, tackle

Left: The Tochterman Tackle shop has been in this same location since 1916.

Below: Tochterman's fly-fishing expert, Henry Lingenfelder, demonstrates tying a Clouser Minnow fly.

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

and snacks, and resumed riding to their fishing destination.

Tochterman’s has since annexed four adjacent buildings. It still lacks a parking lot, and streetcars no longer rumble past, but customers keep rolling in. Over the decades, the shop has catered to business leaders, philanthropists, politicians (including U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski and Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer), fishing royalty (fly-fishing gurus Joe Brooks and Lefty Kreh), baseball royalty (notably Red Sox slugger Ted Williams) and genuine royalty (free-spending Saudi sheikhs). But it’s best known for treating its regular clientele like family.

In a blue-collar block of brick row houses, Tochterman’s trumpets its presence. An iconic neon sign depicts a largemouth bass with the word “tackle” on its side. The fish leaps above the Tochterman name, outlined in red. Tommy and Eddie Tochterman had it installed above the store when their father died in 1938. Ten years ago, a large rockfish mural was added to part of the building.

Tony has applied his touch inside the store’s Dutch-blue doorway, where rows of fishing rods cross above customers’ heads like a saber arch at a military wedding. Exiting this tunnel of tackle, you’re greeted by a store employee or by Tony or Dee, both of

whom work the store’s six-day weeks. (It used to be seven until Dee put her foot down.) Dee insists on promptly greeting customers, not as salesmanship but as solace.

“You can tell when someone’s having the worst day. If that first greeting is nice, it changes them. Their shoulders go down a little bit,” she says. “It’s fishing; now they’re comfortable. You don’t have to sell them a thing, you just made them comfortable.”

Dee greets me warmly at the back counter, where we chat about worms. Once known as the “Worm Girl,” she was for years the devoted caretaker of shipments of bloodworms the store

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

handled during fishing season. These writhing, biting bristle worms—deadly bait for species like rockfish—had to be sorted, cleaned, refrigerated and kept in a special-salinity bath that Dee developed to mimic the worms’ native coastal Maine and Canadian waters. It was a painstaking, seven-days-a-week chore that boosted the business’s bottom line; bloodworms sold for $12 a dozen and Tochterman’s peddled tens of thousands weekly in the summer.

But bloodworms became overharvested, overpriced and physically underwhelming, Dee says.

So, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, she made a leap of faith. The store switched to selling lugworms imported directly from diggers in China. “I don’t have to do anything with them,” Dee says of their care. “It’s kind of nice. It’s kind of strange.” Slow to catch on at first, “lugs” are becoming more and more popular with customers, and Tochterman’s once-renowned bloodworms are a bait of the past.

Tony joins us and we climb a timeworn stairway to chat. The Tochtermans just look like they belong together. At 73, he’s showing some of his dad’s gray hair. She’s 65, darkhaired, and as perpetually pleasant as her husband. They’ve been a couple for 30 years, married for 12, having met when Dee began working at the store in the 1990s. Both come from families who believed above all in hard work.

“When I asked her to marry me, she was counting worms downstairs,” Tony says. Dee’s reply was “Yes, okay, we’ll talk about it tonight.” They live

directly across the street in two row houses joined by a walkway, enjoying what leisure hours they have in the home’s tree-shaded courtyard, which features a koi pond. They have two dogs, but no children.

Talk to them for any length of time—we conversed at a fly-tying bench as they welcomed clients who wandered by—and you’ll hear stories about family, their customers and the store, but little about their own fishing exploits, although both enjoy the sport.

Dee’s mother, Rusty, often worked two jobs, including stints as a waitress, a cab driver and, for 38 years, soldering missile components for Westinghouse. But she made time to take her daughter fishing— everywhere. “If it was semi-bad weather, like windy, we’d go to Loch Raven [Reservoir]. We’d have lunch and fish,” Dee remembers.

Tony never knew his grandfather but was told he preferred tending store

Left: Kevin Trupia spins braided line onto a Penn spinning reel.

Above: Clouser Minnow flies all pre-tied and ready for 'perch-jerking time.'

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

to fishing. “He fished, but he wasn’t obsessed with fishing. He was obsessed with working.” His father and uncle fished when they could, especially in Middle and Back rivers for bass and pike.

Tochterman’s once kept unimaginable hours: 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, including holidays. (These days the store is open Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.) Secondand third-generation Tochtermans were expected to help from a young age.

When other boys were playing with Matchbox cars, Tony was unpacking boxes of lures for his father, sorting the River-Runts, Tiny Torpedoes and others by size and color. “I learned the colors and I learned the lures. By repetition, I learned the products,” he

says. He remains a tackle geek. “I like fishing, but I love fishing tackle and I love the industry. I appreciate where tackle was, the quality of it, where it came from and how it’s progressed.”

In his teens and early 20s, Tony fished in freshwater and saltwater, from the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries to South America and the Mediterranean. One of his mentors was the late Lefty Kreh, the fly-fishing legend and Baltimore Sun outdoors columnist who bought his first flyfishing outfit at Tochterman’s in the 1940s. He and Tony grew so close that, towards the end of his life, Kreh signed his letters to Tony as “Dad.”

Tony’s fishing stories tend to be either vicarious—his customers’ adventures—or self-deprecating. Like the time Kreh was advising him how

Right: The Tochterman bass icon shines above a vast array of spinning reels. Their motto: 'If Tochterman’s doesn’t have it, you don’t need it.'

to cast for bonefish in the Turneffe Islands off Belize, telling Tony to aim well in front of the notoriously spooky fish. “Sure enough, my cast went right into the middle of the school and the whole water exploded,” Tony recalls.

In print, Kreh seemed to delight in slyly tweaking his protégé. Describing a trip to the Eastern Shore in search of crappie, Kreh was amused to learn that Tony’s insulated mug held not hot coffee but cold Coke, “something I would have considered a form of punishment,” Kreh wrote. He went on to describe how Tony—while protesting that he wasn’t hungry— devoured two bags of Kreh’s cookies: “He graciously allowed me to eat my cheese, but I found out later that he didn’t like it.”

Contemporaries in age, Kreh and Tommy Tochterman were friends in business and temperament, Tony says. Straight-shooters who were generous with their knowledge, neither could abide pretension. Once, Tony recalls, his father upbraided a wealthy businessman who wanted him to order what Tommy considered substandard tackle for his employees’ fishing outing. Not only did the man ultimately accept Tommy’s outfitting recommendations, years later, he helped him get a bank loan.

“He was honorable. He was ethical. Just a hard act to follow,” Tony says of his father, who insisted his four children get good, often strict, educations. The two boys, Tony and his brother, Tommy, attended

Left: Tony Tochterman points to a baseball signed by Ted Williams, a loyal customer.

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

McDonogh, a then-all-male prep school in Owings Mills where students wore military-style uniforms. The school was so formative for Tony that when he and Dee married, they chose McDonogh’s chapel for the ceremony.

Tony and his father had a loving if hierarchical relationship; the latter in charge, the former a self-avowed “SOB” (Son of the Boss). “That’s the way it was back then,” Tony says. “This is mine and when I’m dead, then it’s yours. It’s a little different today.”

“Is it?” Dee teases. “How old were you when you took over? C’mon, tell us, Tone.” Tony’s father, she says, “was the boss til the day he passed away.”

In 1981, Tony and his brother assumed control of the business from their father and uncle. But the brothers split, bitterly, over differing business philosophies. Tommy III left in 1986 to open a short-lived outdoors store, Tochterman’s of Timonium. “He went his way and I went mine,” Tony says. The family’s financial disputes dragged out for a decade in court.

“The war,” Dee calls it. (Tommy Tochterman III died in 2013. No other family members are currently involved in the business.)

Dee was particularly close to her father-in-law. Asked to describe him, she purses her lips in a knowing grin. “Old school, number one,” she says. “A handshake man, you know? If he says, ‘I will do this,’ he’s going to do it.”

Even when he ought not to—like showing up for work despite declining health. “The last day he was here we had to pick him up from the car and physically carry him in,” Tony says. Once, Tommy lost consciousness while tending the register and woke surrounded by EMTs. He ordered them to leave and resumed work. “He didn’t want to be out of here. And that’s why his ashes are in the case, because that’s where he wanted to be.”

No longer able to speak, Tommy Tochterman Jr. died at his home four blocks from the store. Tony recalls visiting that night, the Saturday before Labor Day 1998. “I told him, ‘We made

it through the summer. I appreciate all the help you gave me. You know you missed your dad. It’s about time for you to go home.’” Forty-five minutes later, Tony says, he and Dee learned that Tommy had passed away.

Tommy’s wife of 68 years, Antoinette Kolodziejski Tochterman, died in 2007. Another avid angler and the store’s some-time bookkeeper, she and her husband rest in Tochterman’s trophy case among vintage reels and family mementos, just below a baseball Ted Williams autographed for Tommy. (Tommy and Eddie Tochterman advised Williams on a line of tackle the Hall of Famer endorsed for Sears & Roebuck.)

Not long after his father’s death, Tony was closing up one night with an associate, telling the man he might move a display of surf-casting accessories. “Dad hated those sand spikes hanging up there,” he explained. Soon afterward, several spikes fell to the floor. “I told you he wanted them moved,” Tony quipped. 

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

The customers Tochterman’s serves today are often the children and grandchildren of previous customers. Recently, a man brought his grandson in to buy the boy’s first fishing rod. “As he walked out the door, he turned around and gave me a hug,” Tony says. “You know,” the customer told Tony tearfully, “my grandfather brought me in here when I was 6 years old to get my first outfit.”

Mike Orr, a fisherman from Eldersburg who ties and paints jigs, tells me he’s been shopping here since Tony’s dad ran the place. “They’re really friendly. You can’t beat them. And their prices are good,” he says, comparing them favorably to a larger chain retailer. “Even if they raised their prices, it’s still worth coming

here for the people. If you need anything, they’re willing to work it out with you.”

Newer customers echo similar sentiments online:

“Tony let me try every reel to fit my old Blue Stream rod.”

“They fixed a Penn reel bought there almost 20 years ago for free in five minutes.”

“These people know their stuff and make you feel a part of the family.”

Tochterman’s doesn’t do internet sales, preferring to deal one-on-one with customers. And forget about franchising the operation: “I don’t want to be McDonald’s,” Tony says. “We enjoy life, and we enjoy our reputation.”

Which means they plan to keep working. “We’ve had three weeks’ vacation in 30 years,” he says. Dee seems skeptical. “Three weeks, really?”

They start counting: England for a week to see friends, and …. “Wait a minute!” Tony says. “For your birthday, I took you to tackle shows.”

With no family heirs, Tony admits the business lacks a succession plan. He hopes that, when the time comes, someone will offer to buy Tochterman’s based on its reputation and run it with the same customersfirst philosophy. He says he won’t accept an offer based purely on financial gain: “Our name is too important to us.”

Despite Tochterman’s multigenerational legacy, Tony says that he’s neither anxious nor pressured about its future. If the right buyer fails to materialize, he’s prepared to liquidate. “I told Dee when it gets to the point—whether it’s this year or ten years from now—you got a key, I got a key, lock the door. It’s done.”

Somehow that seems like one thing that Tochterman’s faithful customers just won’t buy.

Tochterman's fly-fishing section features flies for every fish.

JEFFERSON HOLL\AND

Maryland native and award-winning contributor Marty LeGrand writes about nature, the environment and Chesapeake history.

Grilled Oysters with Gremolata & Charred Bread

Recipe

by SeaSalt Restaurant’s Executive Chef Alfredo Malinis

John Hogan, co-owner of the SeaSalt Restaurant that’s slated to open in Annapolis this spring, recently stopped by the Chesapeake Bay Media offices to demonstrate Chef Malanis’ recipe. Here's how to make the Bay delicacy.

Prep the grill: Chef prefers a Weber Kettle with either charcoal or lump hardwood, but any flat grill with a lid or a deep pan to cover the oysters will work. Use a coal starter with paper—do not use lighter fluid, as it leaves a petroleum residue on the coals. Light your starter coals and add more charcoal once they are ready. When coals are hot and gray, move them to one side of the grill, leaving an open or indirect zone for the oysters. (Carefully place a hand approximately 5-6 inches above the coals to check the temperature—they are ready if you can hold your hand for only a few seconds before it gets too hot for comfort). Place a grate over the coals, heat for 2 minutes and then scrub with a wire brush. Leave the bottom and top vents of the kettle open at least partially to allow coals to continue to heat. The grill is now ready.

Oysters: Farm-raised oysters are ideal, as they tend to be larger than wild-caught oysters. They can also be eaten year-round, unlike wild oysters. Carefully shuck the oysters. Spoon one tablespoon of gremolata (recipe next page) on each of the shucked oysters. Place the oysters on the grill over the indirect zone (the side with no coals underneath). Cover with the lid and heat for 5–8 minutes or until the gremolata begins to brown around the edges and top. Carefully remove them as the shells will be hot. Serve with charred bread.

Bread: Chef prefers fresh sourdough or a baguette. Slice as you like (1" thick is ideal). Brush one side with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt. You can brush both sides of bread with oil if you prefer. Place on the grill for 2-4 minutes or until crispy with grill marks, then flip and grill the other side. Slice into bite-size portions and serve with the

oysters.

SeaSalt Restaurant opens this spring at 1 Park Place, Suite 7 in Annapolis.

SeaSalt co-owner John Hogan demonstrates the recipe on a grill at the CBM offices in Annapolis.

Watch Hogan cook up grilled oysters with gremolata, scan this QR code:

INGREDIENTS:

1 bunch fresh flat leaf parsley

½ bunch fresh cilantro

zest of one lemon

2 tbsp capers

1 whole large bulb of garlic

1–2 single anchovies in oil

⅓ cup olive oil

⅛ cup apple cider vinegar

3 tbsp fresh lemon juice

3 large pinches kosher salt

1 tbsp fresh ground pepper

1 tbsp fresh ground cumin

INSTRUCTIONS:

Combine all ingredients in a food processor and pulse to blend smooth. Gremolata should be bright green, and not runny like water, nor thick like mayo. Season to taste, adding more oil, salt or vinegar accordingly. For a more savory sauce, add additional anchovies. The sauce should be a bit salty, tangy, savory and garlicky. You can refrigerate it for up to 14 days. It’s great on bread, vegetables, meats or fish.

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Chesapeake Lifestyle Experts

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474 Sandy Run Trail Kilmarnock

Ode to the Equinox

by Jefferson Holland, Poet Laureate of Eastport

(In the mid-1970s, Capt. Bob Turner, who ran the Annapolis Yacht Yard on the Eastport side of the harbor, got tired of fixing other peoples’ boats all winter. His socks had absorbed the residue of every hull he’d been working on: splotches of bottom paint, fiberglass resin, metal shavings, teak stain. On one chilly day in March, out of desperation, he peeled off his socks, doused them with lighter fluid, and turned them into ashes while toasting the pyre with a swig from a long-neck bottle of Budweiser. Suddenly, the clouds parted, the sun appeared and, at long last, spring finally sprang. Now, half a century later, there are sock-burning celebrations in nearly every sailor’s port on the globe.)

Them Eastport boys got an odd tradition

When the sun swings to its equinoxical position, They build a little fire down along the docks, They doff their shoes and they burn their winter socks.

Yes, they burn their socks at the equinox

You might think that’s peculiar, but I think it’s not, See, they’re the same socks they put on last fall, And they never took ’em off to wash ’em, not at all

So they burn their socks at the equinox

In a little ol’ fire burnin’ nice and hot, Some think incineration is the only solution, ‘Cause washin’ ’em contributes to the Chesapeake’s pollution

Through the spring and the summer and into the fall, They go around not wearin’ any socks at all, Just stinky bare feet stuck in old deck shoes

Whether out on the water or enjoyin’ a brew

So if you sail into the harbor on the 20th of March

And smell a smell like limburger mixed in with laundry starch, You’ll know you’re downwind of the Eastport docks

Where they’re burning their socks for the equinox.

ANNAPOLIS AND ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY CONFERENCE AND VISITORS BUREAU

on the menu in talbot county

No matter the season, Talbot County is the Eastern Shore’s culinary hotspot. Explore our coastal towns, fabulous restaurants, and elegant inns. Or bike, kayak, and sail the Chesapeake Bay.

1 pack puff pastry sheets

2 egg yolks

1 stick butter, halved

4 Tbsp. all-purpose flour

1 ½ c. red potatoes, cubed

1 Tbsp. olive oil

2 celery stalks, cubed

1 medium onion, cubed

1 medium carrot, cubed

1 tsp. fresh thyme

1 bay leaf

1 c. water

¾ c. dry white wine

1 pt. heavy cream

½ c. oyster juice

½ c. green peas

2 ½ Tbsp. Old Bay Seasoning

30 select oysters

Salt and black pepper to taste

Unroll puff pastry on sheet pan; brush with egg yolk and mark with the back of a fork. Freeze for 1 hour until pastry hardens. In a stainless steel bowl, mix 4 tablespoons of softened butter with flour; set aside. In a small saucepan, cook cubed potatoes for 5 minutes; drain and set aside.

For filling, melt remaining 4 tablespoons of butter with olive oil in a high-sided saucepan. Stir in celery, onion, carrot, thyme, and bay leaf. Add water and cook on medium heat for 5 minutes. Add white wine and simmer for 5 more minutes. Pour in heavy cream and oyster juice. Whisking continuously, simmer for 2-3 minutes. Whisk butter and flour mixture into pot pie base; cook for an additional 2-3 minutes. Add cooked potatoes, peas, Old Bay Seasoning, and raw oysters. Cook for 3-4 minutes until oysters are just cooked. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Spoon oyster pot pie mixture into individual 1-cup casserole dishes.

Remove pastry from freezer and let sit for 3 minutes. Cut pastry with circular cutter; bake at 375 degrees for 10–12 minutes. Bake individual pot pies at 375 degrees for 5 minutes. Place the pastry lid on top and serve immediately. Makes six individual servings.

Individual Oyster Pot Pies from The Robert Morris Inn

Recipe courtesy of Chef Mark Salter, The Robert Morris Inn in Oxford